


Taking in Strays 2

by PrincessDesire



Series: Taking in Strays [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Azazel's Special Children (Supernatural), Dean and Sam spend most of the fic apart, Divergent Timelines, F/M, M/M, No Smut, Sibling Incest, Very different sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:46:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 73,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25799932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: Now that Sam knows the truth, he wants revenge on the demon who tainted his soul. He's gonna find the other Azzy kids and create an army. Dean's search keeps coming up empty, and he's starting to lose hope that he'll ever have his brother in his life again.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Original Female Character(s), Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, John Winchester/Original Female Character(s), Sam Winchester/Max Miller
Series: Taking in Strays [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871752
Comments: 14
Kudos: 14





	1. Recap, Author's Note, and Prologue

Recap:

On the night of Mary Winchester’s death, Azazel taints Sam with demon blood and attempts to abduct him. Angel Chalendra arrives just in time to steal the baby away for herself. She raises Sam as a hunter at the cost of her grace. While hunting a waheela (a vicious bear/dog cryptid), Sam runs into Dean, and the two surreptitiously rescue a cub. The boys strike up a fast and flirtatious friendship while the fallen angel and the Winchester patriarch begin to date. The waheela cub’s monthly blood rage transmits through Sam’s demonically-charged psychic powers and, after almost killing a neighbor, it is agreed that he’ll spend his summer on the road hunting with Dean. Over the summer the two boys, unaware that they’re brothers, have lots and lots of sex which somewhere along the way shifts to lovemaking, despite Dean’s wariness. The two finally reach the very important boyfriends title just around the time that Sam interrogates a demon who helps Sam connect the dots on Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon, and dead moms. Crazy with the grief and the shame, Sam confronts Chalendra, trashes a hotel room, and runs away, leaving Dean with only a note saying not to follow him. 

Author's Note 

This took me four years to write. I've never had such terrible writer's block before, and I'll admit that I'm not crazy about the results, but I didn't quit. I haven't watched the series since season 10 and while Sam and Dean will always be one of my favorite OTPs, it was hard to try and put my head back into their world of angels and Impala mileage. This is a very different second half but it's one of the ways that I saw Sam's path go after leaving Dean behind in that trashed motel room. Even if you don't like it as much as the first one, I hope that it provides some sense of closure to their story. Thanks for your patience.

Prologue

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma - September 1996

Adopted. How can she be adopted? She’s the spitting image of her mother, for crying out loud! Same nose, same cowlick in the same spot. They even make the same stupid squeak that passes for a sneeze. Brianne isn’t a Leary, shares no genetic material with them, but she is a Leary, because they’re the only family she’s ever known. She's been taught how to think like them and act like them. It’s like she’s been living in a cult that’s slowly making her into a clone.

Well, no more for her, no siree Bob.

She’s got her backpack and the six twenties stolen from “Dad’s” wallet. That’ll get her out of Oklahoma City and somewhere where she can choose her family, people who won’t feed her lies for 13 years. If she wanted to, she could make friends with that homeless woman under the sad-looking blanket or with that creepy man wearing shades even though it’s night who keeps looking at her from his place on the opposite bench. Then again, maybe the bus depot isn’t the best place to start looking for companions, but she also doesn’t feel afraid to try. She feels brave. She might not be a Leary, but she is still the Oklahoma City Powerlifting – Children’s Division winner three years running, still the best actress that Johnny D, director of the community theater has ever seen, and still the one who had pulled up Andy Frizzon’s fat butt from the well he’d gotten himself stuck in for two days. Her newfound otherness can’t take those things from her, can’t rob her of her identity entirely. Those are  _ her _ deeds, not her family’s.

The man with the sunglasses is still looking at her; the yellow tint of the shades block UV but she can see his pupils well enough, can tell that the black dots are on her, not the ticket booth behind her or even the trash can beside her.

_ Brave _ , she thinks, before hunching over, one hand gripping the strap atop her backpack and asking, she hopes not sounding mad, because she doesn’t mind, not really. “Why are you watching me?”

His smile reminds her of lizards. “Because I can tell that you’re special,” he says.

The homeless woman begins to babble about birds, thinking somewhere in her unstable brain that the conversation includes her. It makes Brianne wish that she was, because the idea that anyone could be as excluded from the conversations of others as this woman is, well that’s just too sad, too close to how pushed out she feels by her family.

Brianne rolls her eyes at the man. “That doesn’t even make sense!” she says. The mint on which she’s been sucking almost falls out of her mouth and she clips her words short to reel it back in with a slurp. Candy back to being intact in the space between her teeth and cheek, she continues. “I mean, it’s not sweet talk, like buttering me up. At least, not with compliments. People don’t want to be special. They want to be cool or smart or pretty.”

“Am I supposed to be complimenting you?” he asks, voice low, amused.

She’s started to sweat, nervous excitement at talking to a strange man who has such obvious designs to have sex with her. She has no intention of being anyone else’s victim tonight. If the confrontation with her former parents has taught her anything, it’s that she needs to be more world-wise, more attentive to people around her, especially those that want to manipulate her like this guy.

“Unless you want to try to offer me candy, but I’m a little old for that.”

The man has a way of laughing without making a sound, a tweak at the edge of his thin lips maybe. “I’m not a pedophile. And you’ve already got candy.”

She shrugs, but there’s something believable about the way he says the words like, if he was intending to rape and kill her, he’d be willing to just admit it up-front.

The train station is indoors. That’s why there’s so many homeless here, seeking refuge from the rain outside. She’s told herself a few times since she came in the door that she’s one of them now, but it doesn’t permeate beneath the shallowest layers of her thinking. She knows, deep down, that they’ll come for her, and, a layer below that, she knows that she wants them to. That’s why she bought a ticket for Nashville, because it leaves in three hours rather than the forty-five minutes of the El Paso train.

A man with rag-wrapped feet walks by carrying with him the odor of garbage and weeks-old sweat. Her brave eyes stare until he notices her looking, then they look away, to any place else. He coughs, a wheezing hack that ends with some spittle right there on the floor.

It’s a bit like being in a horror movie, surrounded by zombies. She’s trying to incorporate herself amongst them, until her family saves her, perhaps right before they eat her brains.

The man in sunglasses is still watching her. She frowns at him. “So you’re staring at me cause I’m special?”

He opens his hands, a gesture of peace. “There’s nothing wrong with being special. It just means that you’re worth more than others.”

That’s something that she hasn’t heard before. Everyone is supposed to be special in their own way. Of course, she’s old enough to know that’s a load of donkey poop, but it is what people say, something they tell themselves to make themselves feel less alone.

At her skeptical look, the guy nods, as though she’s voiced her objection out loud. “Of course, God didn’t create us all equal, after all.” He tilts his head to the side, indicating the crazy homeless woman. She’s no longer mumbling about birds, has lapsed into quiet gibberish. “We are worth more, those of us that have… talents.”

The only reason that Brianne laughs is that she’s uncomfortable, the mockery is a comfort. “So you’re special too?” she asks. She’s decided that the man is just as insane as the homeless woman. She might be the only sane one in the station.

“Let’s not focus on me just now, Brianne. I want to talk about you and your gifts.”

If she’d been scared earlier when arriving here by herself, stolen money secreted away on her person, then now she is terrified and in less than an instant too, like when someone comes into the bathroom while you’re under the water and unable to see or hear. “How did you know my name?”

“Just a gift,” he shrugs. “Like your incredible strength. Unusual, but not anything to fear. Well, I suppose that depends on how you use it, right? Like saving little boys from wells. Though by the same token, it would probably be just as easy for you to, say, snap a stranger’s neck in a train station, one who you were worried might cause you harm though he means only to offer you a chance.”

Even while fear is tickling at her neck, a spider that needs squashing, she can’t help but ask. “A chance for what?”

“Why, a chance to rule the world.”


	2. Runaway

Runaway

Las Vegas, Nevada - August 1999

Sam’s duffels are heavy, but that’s not why his arms are shaking, or at least not entirely. He’d left behind some things, some destroyed and some that felt so unimportant that he doesn’t know why he brought them in the first place. Not that much feels relevant now, just the revelations, one wallop-packing one atop the other, stacking like the last Tetriminos before the game over screen. 

He’s seen movies where, once the protagonist stumbles upon the plot twist, the scenes containing clues are shown again, so the audience can say, “Oh yeah,  _ that’s _ what was meant there.” The tidbits of info formerly withheld are interconnected like the steps that led Oedipus to his fate, yet no matter how many times Sam replays the scenes of his life, he can’t see how he could’ve guessed the truth. This doesn’t seem like a twist so much as an entirely different movie. Gone is the action blockbuster of an orphan raised by an angel to fight the forces of evil. Even the romance his film had become this summer, falling in love with a broken boy and putting him back together with affection and loyalty, was wrong, all wrong; this summer hasn’t been about fixing anything, but shattering it into a million pieces, contaminating it with the evil that pumps through his veins. Now he knows he’s a hybrid abomination created to serve as a soldier for the demon Azazel, stolen away by a deceptive fallen angel. He’d defiled his true family, fucking his brother sixteen ways from Sunday, exploiting Dean’s unhealthy emotional state for his own selfish incestuous desires. 

The heat makes the bags feel heavier. It’s August in Vegas; the road burns back the heat, cooking him from above and below. He takes the discomfort, hopes it roasts him to a crisp right there. The sting of sweat and tears mixing in his eyes is only the tiniest fraction of what he deserves. He wants to step in front of the cars that pass him, just lie out and let his twisted existence be snuffed out, roadkill under rubber. Instead, he continues crooking his thumb at them. He has to get the hell out and fast. He has no illusions that his note will do anything to prevent Dean from trying to find him. He needs to put as much distance between himself and Vegas as quickly as he can. He’ll worry about what comes after when it happens, but he would shatter into a million pieces if Dean was ever to look at him again, and so this is the important part: escaping.

After two hours, he’s just about to give his burnt thumb a break, change his tactic, maybe hop a freight train like so many adventurous runaways (though it seems much less romantic with the burden of his sins weighing so heavily upon him), when a car stops for him. It waits maybe thirty feet ahead, a white Chrysler with a Rotary sticker on the back. Sam can only make out one shape. Despite his training, Sam is apprehensive about approaching the car, not trusting the type of person willing to stop for an obvious runaway. Still, he goes anyway, comforted by the easily accessed blade in the outside zipper of his duffel and the gun secured tightly against his lower back. 

The fear vanishes as he sees a short-haired pointer squeezing its head through the space at the top of the passenger-side window. Sam laughs in surprise. “Hey, pup!” he greets. Its stubbed tail wags furiously and it barks, friendly but excited. A face is just visible behind the spotted dog and Sam leans down to introduce himself, and, of course, ask for a ride. Luckily, his tears have abated for the time being, and any residual red from his hour-long sobfest is sure to be lost beneath the developing sunburn that will no doubt contribute to his misery tomorrow.

“There’s no point in telling her to shut up!” the driver yells. She yanks on the collar, pulling the dog back from the door so they can see each other. “Hello,” she says. “I’m Traci.”

“Hi. James.”

“Where are you trying to get to, James?”

He realizes that he should have thought of a destination. Even if it was just a place to start his search, it will seem all the more suspicious if he just tells this stranger that he needs to put as much distance between himself and Las Vegas, and it doesn’t matter where they go. “Probably farther east than you are,” he says evasively. “So, I’ll take whatever I can.”

She laughs. “I doubt you’re going further east than me unless you really like swimming!” She crooks her thumb at the backseat and he sees a pile of cardboard boxes. It’s going to be a tight squeeze getting his duffel back there; that is if this woman doesn’t mind letting him into her car. “Virginia.”

Considering his luck in the past few hours, or his whole life honestly, Sam’s shock is hardly surprising. “Well, I’d love a lift as far as you’ll have me and hey, I have my license…” he hears his mistake and his mouth rambles out the rest of the sentence while his brain swears sailor-style. “So, I can take some of the driving shifts.” 

Their eyes meet, a small glint of amusement as close to an acknowledgment of his slip as she gives him. “Well, get in before you melt. It’s fucking hot out there!”

Traci is in her early forties. When she was eighteen, she hitchhiked from Virginia to LA with the ambition of being a Hollywood actress. After twenty years of lineless gigs on TV shows; outrageous shares of rent for dirty, too-small apartments; men and women too worried about their careers to care about her; droughts; brush fires; smog; and traffic that made her want to strip her head bald hair-by-hair, Traci tells him that she is ready to admit defeat and head back home. 

Dotty, the sweet beast with a seemingly unending supply of energy, was abandoned at a vet after a bus collision. Traci was introduced to the mutt hours before her scheduled lethal injection by her friend, a veterinary assistant who knew that the dog would be safe as soon as Traci was made aware of the situation. The two had become inseparable immediately, much to the consternation of her roommates, two aspiring starlets nearly half her age who Traci seemed to like about as much as a visit to the dentist.

These condensed biographies last them to Dry Lake, Nevada (Sam had noticed the sign with a sliver of amusement). He wouldn’t mind her talking the whole way to Virginia, anything to offer a diversion from wallowing in self-pity or worrying about his plans for the immediate future. Sure, it’s a little hard to focus on what she’s saying, especially with how quickly her words bubble out, but even trying is useful, the effort distracting.

“So, is there a point to asking about you or would I get a pack of lies?” Traci asks, oral memoir all wrapped up, for the moment at least; he suspects that she’s her own favorite subject.

Sam scratches Dotty’s ear absentmindedly. She’s turned him into an armchair, complete with massage attachment. It’s soothing, makes him think of Cujo, though the waheela would not be so trusting of a stranger, nor game for such a long session of physical affection. “I moved around a lot. Got… well, some bad news, and now I have to locate people.”

Traci considers his words. “Vague, but it sounded honest. I’m going to guess family?”

“Kind of,” he acknowledges, though the blood bond she’s thinking is more wholesome than the reality of the situation. “Family I didn’t know I had.”

“Gotchya,” she says, easily. “You’ve got a license, but how much experience do you have with long trips?”

“I drove about 400 miles and back over the course of three days. That was a few months back. Otherwise, just trips to the store here and there.” 

If she minds the lack of detail in his answer, she doesn’t show it. “Good, because I might take you up on your offer at some point. You know, after I’ve had a chance to feel you out.” Sam nods. He’d thrown out the offer but he knows that if their positions were reversed, he wouldn’t just let some hitchhiker drive his car. “Dotty trusts you, though, so that’s a good start.”

“She knows a sucker when she sees one,” he says ruffling the fur between her shoulder blades as he did with the waheela he’ll never pet again.

Traci laughs. “Try shelling out two grand just to keep a damn dog alive. Then, she showed how much she hated her safety cone by peeing on my schoolgirl skirt.” When Sam looks at her in surprise, she says, “What? I may seem old to you but I’m hot, in case you haven’t noticed.”

He actually hadn’t. He’d just been so grateful for the ride (and its air-conditioner) and the miles that they are putting between him and Dean, that he hadn’t evaluated her as a person, only as a means to a goal. He instantly feels guilty.

“Wow, thanks,” she mutters, shaking her head. 

“It’s not like that!” he says, because now that he does look at her, he sees that she is very pretty, certainly not old and she’s shapely in ways that Dean would have commented creepily about. “I don’t…um, I like guys.”  _ And I love one, but he’s my brother _ , he thinks, but keeps his mouth shut tight. All of these deep thoughts are closer to the surface than he’d like. They matter too much.

This seems to be the correct answer though, because Traci brightens. “You and half the men in LA. Sure you wouldn’t rather be traveling west? You’d have better luck back there.”

Sam shakes his head, then lowers it. It will be a cold day in hell before he ever dates again. Every time he thinks about everything he’s lost, Dean and Chal and any sense of rightness in the universe, the despair starts to suffocate him. It’s probably only having a task at hand that’s keeping him sane, keeping the pain from killing him. He just needs to move forward and not look back.

* * *

Las Vegas, Nevada - August 1999

Vegas is a big city with lots of big places for runaway teenagers, even gangly six-foot ones, to hide. Dean’s intention to drive all day despite his intuition telling him that Sam is long gone is cut short by Chal finally returning his call. His relief is hampered by his dread of having to tell her that he lost her son. Still, he answers the phone on the first ring. “Hey! Chal! We’ve got a problem.”

“I am aware.” 

More relief. “He called you? Did he say where he was going? Is he heading back to you?”

“He’s not with you?”

“No, he took off on me last night. What problem were you talking about?”

“Oh. He… I thought his anger would just be directed to me. He called me last night and told me that he never wants to see me again. As such, I don’t think he intends to return to me, but I’m surprised he would cut ties with you.”

Dean watches a group of native Las Vegans board a bus. Most people look disheartened to be on public transport, and these men and women are no exception. That they can worry about basic shit like employment right now with Sam missing is yet another of those situations that make Dean feel like the dude in They Live, like only he can see the dark world that actually surrounds people that think about things like mortgages and espressos. “Why would he say that?”

She doesn’t answer for long enough that he checks to see if she’s still there. “I am,” she replies. “And I will explain what I know, but first, I need you to tell me what happened out there. He received some… information. How did that come about?”

Dean furrows his brow. He was there and he’s not even sure what happened. He tries to break it down, but even with the recentness of what just happened, the facts seem scattered and shadowy. “Sam was getting information from the thing, the demon that Dad found for us in Vegas. She called him one of Azazel’s Kids. I think maybe he recognized the name. Anyway, he starts freaking out cause this demon bitch is telling him that he’s evil and has some demon for a dad, maybe? I’m not really sure what she was saying with that. She did say he was building a kid army. So, he’s pretty freaked out but he keeps asking her questions anyway. He asks her about Old Yellow Eyes so that Dad and I can find her. I think he was doing okay still, but then she starts screaming that she only knows one yellow-eyed demon and that it’s this Azazel guy. And Chal, he just shut… down. Like, he got really pale, and I thought maybe he was gonna faint or he was having a heart attack or something. He said he needed to talk to you, so we left. I mean, he finished off the demon first, but then we booked it out of there back to the hotel.”

He’s been rattling this stuff around in his head trying to make sense of Sam’s reaction. Best he can figure is that maybe this Azazel demon is both Sam’s dad and the demon that killed Mom. That doesn’t sound right though. On top of being an epically weird coincidence, like lottery-winning-odds weird, that doesn’t explain him running off or not wanting to see Chal again. 

“He sent me out for food, and, Chal, I really didn’t want to leave him alone, but he was making it sound like he’d just zapped his energy on her. I thought maybe if I fed him, he wouldn’t look so pale and then he’d talk about what was going on, cause he wouldn’t tell me on the ride back from the casino. He really didn’t look good. When I got back with the food, he’d trashed our room and left a note telling me not to follow him.” He’s trying as hard as he can to tamp down the panic in his voice; it’s pretty wussy and he doesn’t want to worry Chal anymore than this shit already is. He watches his own eyes in the rearview mirror. They’re wide, blood-shot, and scared. He’s scared for his, well, his boyfriend.

“So, I’ve been driving around, but I haven’t seen even one strand of brown shaggy hair. I don’t think he’s in Vegas anymore. His note said “follow” so he’s definitely not sticking around here. He hates it here anyway. But, I think he thumbed a ride or hopped a train. Damn Chal, I should have gone to the train station or the bus station. Dammit!” He slams his hand hard on Baby’s steering wheel.

“Sam has been raised to disappear, Dean. It is not going to be easy to find him if he doesn’t want to be found.”

“I don’t even know why he ran, Chal.”

“He ran because he found out that you are his brother.”

He takes this in a hippy-dippy ‘we are all family’ way, so he lets out a “psh” into the phone. Chal may not know everything about what they’ve been up to on this trip because she’s amazingly clueless for a grown woman, but she’s got to at least suspect that there’s more than a brotherly affection between them. “I don’t think that’s it,” he says snarkily. “Something that demon said got into his head. And he was really set on calling you, even while we were still with Miss Black Eyes.”

After a long moment, Chal says, “I don’t think you’re understanding me. You knew that it was a yellow-eyed demon who killed your mother and Sam knew it was Azazel who killed his. Once he found out that Azazel has yellow eyes, he was able to connect the timelines. Dean, Sam is your missing baby brother.”

Dean waits for her to say something else, something sensible. She doesn’t. She just cries, softly. He runs through the words in his head, but it’s just trigonometry in his head or like trying to translate the individual Latin words he recites for incantations. It means nothing.

“He’s not my brother,” Dean says. “He’s some kid I bumped into on a hunt.” 

“When Sam was six months old, a demon killed the guardian angel protecting his nursery, infused him with demon blood, lit his mother on fire, and then tried to steal him away. He was stopped by another angel who raised him on her own and kept him secret from Azazel and his surviving family, his father and his brother.”

Dean glares incredulously at the phone as though expecting the appliance itself to argue back. Maybe it will; it’s been a hell of a night. His brain is essentially a rat in a maze. The cheese is the answer to all this but he keeps bumping on walls instead of finding the middle. They never found Sam Winchester and now there was this kid, same age as Dean’s brother, an orphan raised by someone who looked too young to be his mom with special powers that seem connected to demons, the same kind of monster that killed Mary. It couldn’t be though, right? 

“You’re saying that… that you’re an angel?”

“I was, yes. My penance for disobeying orders was losing my grace. I am, more or less, mortal now. I don’t seem to be aging, yet.”

“And you were the one who kidnapped Sam?”

“To protect him, yes.” 

“And you killed Yellow Eyes.”

“No, I just took the baby and flew away. Azazel is still out there and he still desperately wants your brother.” 

“And my brother Sam is… He’s still alive. He’s my Sam?” Against his wishes, his eyes begin to water. He opens them wide and blinks frequently, trying to suck the moisture in, keep himself from crying again. It had been embarrassing enough doing it alone; he won’t do it in front of Chal. He bites down on his lower lip and smiles at the same time. “That’s Sam?” He laughs. “All grown-up?”

Chal permits him a minute to gather himself. He feels a little euphoric like he’s been asleep but the dream is still sticking to him a little even though he’s awake. Sam is their Sam. He grew up to be a kickass hunter too, even without Dad, like it just runs in the family. They certainly don’t look very much alike. He’s comparing their body shapes and facial features in his head, picturing Sam’s body in the very naked state he’s come to know it in. “Oh shit,” he says. “That’s why he ran away. Oh man, Chal, you should have told us.”

“You may be right. I’ve been selfish. I knew he’d never forgive me for keeping you apart.”

“But, you were just trying to hide him from Azazel right? Me and Dad will gank him sooner or later and then you could have brought him back to us.” He hopes that was her intention. He wants to give the benefit of the doubt to this woman (he’s still wrapping his head around the angel thing) who saved his baby brother. “Hell, now we’ve got double the reason to end that bastard.”

“I was hoping that he’d be beneficial to you in that process once he is ready. Dean, I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to be around you right now. Does he think that you knew and were lying to him as well?”

Dean exhales loudly. Well, shit. He could deflect, say he doesn’t know, but it’s pretty obvious. Maybe it’s less obvious to an angel. Maybe they don’t have sex. He’d always thought angels were fairy tales so he hadn’t wasted much time considering it. Of course, she’s dating Dad so she should have some kind of idea. “Um, we’ve been…You know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t.” He rubs his forehead, feels it scrunch up. “Chal, when two people like each other…” he starts. Then he stops. This is harder than it should be. Dean isn’t used to having to own up to the consequences of sleeping with someone he shouldn’t have. Normally he just gets back into the Impala and leaves it far behind. “You remember how you asked Dad if he was your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Sam asked me that too.”

Dean Winchester lives a weird life. He waits for an angel to understand that he’s been fucking his brother. 

“Sam asked if I was that to him,” he adds.

“Oh.” She stays quiet a while; he’s sure she’s imagining all the things they’ve been up to this summer and probably totally regretting letting Sam join him on the road. “Are you in love too?”

Well, that’s news to him. So, she and Dad have reached the big L-word. “Chal, let’s focus. We need to find Sam, right?”

“I’ve started packing. I think I know where he’ll go eventually. I intend to go there and wait for him.”

Dean considers. “Lawrence.” It’s the only place that makes sense. He’ll want to get to the bottom of everything. See where he was born, maybe see if they have any other living relatives. 

“He won’t go right away, though, so if you have ideas in the meantime, feel free to speak them. I… I think it would be a good idea if your father was looking as well. He has hunter connections too, ones that can help us look for Sam.”

“He is gonna be pissed.”

She sighs. “Yes, I imagine that conversation will go similarly to the one with Sam, but it can’t be helped.”

“Okay, I’m going to stay along a route to Lawrence, see if I can’t catch him on a highway. I’ll send you the numbers once I figure it out. You send Dad down a different one.” Now that he’s got the whole picture, he’s starting to try and get into Sam’s headspace, trying to anticipate him. This is what Dean does. He might not have as much knowledge as his dad, but he was born a hunter and it winds deep into his blood. If any two people can find Sam, it’s the Winchesters. “We’ll find him and keep him safe.”

“Thank you, Dean. You understand why I did it, right?”

“Hey, demons are nothing to mess around with and if Sammy’s still alive after 16 years of being hunted by one, I think you did a good job. Actually, the way he ended up, you did a damn good job.”

There’s an audible quality to her smile somehow and he’s glad that he could grant her this kindness. He doesn’t envy her having to tell Dad. “Alright, let’s track this nerd down,” he says. Then, “Oh, and Chal, the boyfriend stuff, that does  _ not _ get back to Dad, okay?” They’ll work out that weirdness once Sam is safe with John and Dean again. 

“That is not mine to tell.” 

“Good, cause what you’ve got to say is big enough. I’ll text you the highways when I get them worked out.”

“Goodbye and good luck, Dean.”

* * *

Spring Branch, Texas - August 1999

Chalendra’s fingers hit numbers on the phone, few of them are the ones she needs. She aims for a three, hits a six instead with her trembling index finger, curses, and hits the receiver to try again. Her breath echoes tight and fast in the space behind the ringtone; it reminds her of something about being an angel: sound differences at the bottom of the ocean (or on other planets). When he picks up, she’s drowning, lost in the cavern of sound, a tiny mortal about to lose her wings for the second time.

“Chal?” John asks again.

“If you are driving, I need you to pull over to the side of the road.”

No hesitation when he replies, “Give me a minute.” She hears rustling, perhaps the turning of a car wheel, and the soft steady click of a turn signal.

Humans find confession cathartic, a purgation of sins that leaves their souls purified and new. Chal has no soul and, disobeyed orders or no, she can’t bring herself to believe that she has sinned. This confession will be without absolution. It’s going to make John hate her, but if she’s going to find Sam, a boy she’s taught to hide, she’s going to need his family’s help. Even that might not be enough. The longer it takes to start looking for him, the further away he will get from Las Vegas and the more opportunities he will have to pull the ground over himself.

“Okay,” John says. “Go ahead.”

The couch in the living room isn’t cushy; it’s firm, good for company, not for curling up with a book. The cushions don’t sag when Chal sits in the lotus position, attempting to draw strength from the familiar meditative pose. She takes a deep breath, tries to prepare herself for the end of her relationship, and begins. “November 2 nd , 1983…”

* * *

Amarillo, Texas - August 1999

Traci, despite her earlier suggestion that Sam take over driving while she sleeps, decides she wants to stop at a hotel. “I don’t want to be in the car anymore,” she whines. They’ve both been in the car all day with only intermittent food or dog/human bathroom breaks. She’d trusted him enough to walk Dotty while she used the restroom, and he hopes that the plan of getting a hotel room rather than have him drive isn’t because she’s worried she’ll wake up in Canada or something. Her incessant chatter had greatly diminished when they went through New Mexico, so she probably is just tired. He’s been living this life, the four rubber tire one, for two months now and even he’s ready to pack it in. His head had felt too full to sleep in her car.

“So, do you have money for your own room?”

He has plenty of cash and an emergency credit card. Considering the trail it will leave, using the plastic is out, and Sam currently has no means of obtaining more money without Chal. It’s a finite resource for the first time in his life. “Would you be comfortable with me sleeping in the car?” he asks.

Traci frowns; a cute dip forms in her forehead as she does. They’re leaning up against the driver’s side of the Chrysler. Dotty at the very end of her retractable leash, black with silver cartoon dog bones on it, sniffs a bush with gusto smelling the countless other four-legged lodgers. “That’s gonna make me feel pretty guilty.”

Sleeping in a hotel room without Dean is the last thing in the world he wants to do; it’s even less appealing than trying to smash his body into a comfortable sleeping position around the boxes in the backseat. “It’s fine. I compact better than you’d think.”

The corners of her lips raise only out of politeness to the joke. “But it’d be weird to have you in there with me, right?”

Sam nods. “You just met me this morning, so yeah.” He doesn’t mention that he’s packing weaponry; those are definite counts against why she should trust him to share a hotel room with her.

“Argh!” she exclaims, smashing her face with the hand not holding onto the leash. “Fuck decisions. Social etiquette is such a pain in the ass sometimes, isn’t it?”

It’s sweet that she’s conflicted. “Don’t worry about it. Just go get your room, and if you’re okay with it, I’ll take the backseat. It’s warm enough that I can find somewhere to sleep outside too, if it’s not okay.” The danger with that is having her take off in the morning without him. Oh, he can find more people to hitchhike with, but this is a golden ticket, a straight shot to the east coast with someone not deranged or wanting favors for the chauffeur services, and with an affectionate overly excited animal as well.

“And you’re really okay with that? Being crammed back there with the boxes?” He notes that she hadn’t even acknowledged his sleeping outside idea.

He nods. “If you’re okay with a stranger being crammed in your backseat, yeah.”

Traci checks into the hotel, Dotty happily following behind. Before they head inside the room though, she asks him again if it’s alright. Then, after they go in, she comes immediately back out with pillows and a blanket for him. 

  
  


An hour later, Sam is looking at the map, again. Tomorrow they’ll be passing 250 miles south of Lawrence, Kansas. He’s already decided not to go there right away since it’s the first place that Chal will expect him to go, but just seeing how the distance is growing shorter, every mile they travel bringing him closer to his point of origin, is threatening his conviction to carry on to Virginia. Obviously, as a starting place for his search, it’s ideal; what better place to begin than the beginning? But could he get in and get out before Chal shows up looking for him? He’s got a head start on her, but she can catch a plane and be there in less than four hours once Dean tells her that he’s jumped ship. His phone call, a stupid irrational move, told her that he knows everything now and she’ll predict what he’s going to do. The smartest thing to do is head somewhere random, set up a temporary life, part-time job and crappy studio apartment, while he combs the internet and libraries and seeks out demons, tortures them for information about Azazel’s Kids. He’ll have time to see the house where Azazel turned him into something evil, read newspaper articles about the fire that killed Dean’s mother, their mother, and see if he can’t get in contact with friends and family, a long shot after 15 years, but an avenue he will try, but it has to happen after he knows Chal isn’t going to be there waiting for him. 

He can’t face her now; the hurt is too fresh. He needs to think of her as the enemy and not his mother and that is only going to happen with time. He’s pissed now, betrayed, but he still loves her, loves who he thought she was. Going back home to her would be spitting on his birth mother’s grave, would be telling Chalendra that it’s alright that she ruined his life. He knows she’s naive, but how could she not see what was going on between him and Dean? He’s unsure why she’d even kept it a secret. What else has she not told him?

The tap on the Chrysler’s window sends him jumping out of his skin. Traci is standing there, white spaghetti strap tank top and blue men’s boxer shorts, looking as surprised as he does, not having expected him to spring, frightened jack-rabbit style, into the driver’s seat.

“I’m sorry!” she says as he opens the door. Her voice is full of laughter and she reaches out a hand to touch Sam’s shoulder. The charms on her bracelet jingle a bit as she does. He’d tried to identify them all from the passenger seat without appearing to stare. Starfish, sunflower, dog paw, heart, turtle, and one that looks like the skeleton of a rat. “I didn’t mean to scare you!”

“No worries,” he pants, embarrassed by his overreaction. “What’s up?”

“I can’t do it. I can’t let you sleep in the car.”

“No, Traci, really, I don’t want to sleep in the room.”

“Well, I don’t want to lay awake all night worrying about how you’ve had to scrunch up around the boxes in the backseat. Besides, it’s not safe to sleep in a car.”

Her concern is touching, made all the sweeter by how unnecessary it is. He could kill her in an instant, perhaps if he used his powers, without laying a finger on her, and here she is worried about him. He wouldn’t kill her, but he can’t imagine that she’s made her way in LA for twenty years by trusting strangers. “I’m tougher than I look,” he offers. “Besides, it’s good to not trust strangers that you pick up on the highway.”

She laughs, but her voice sounds tired, and so do her eyes in the faded twilight glow. “I’m tougher than I look too. Come on. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

Ten minutes he waits after she goes back inside, trying to decide whether to just get a hotel room of his own to appease her or to just ignore her, stay out in her car or, if she won’t let him stay there, then to sleep in a nook of the hotel complex. 

There’s something about Traci, something strong and confident, a bit like Chal, and it’s that quality that leads him, finally, to lock up the car and return to her room, this time without helping her carry her luggage. Instead, he carries his own, just the one duffle slung over his shoulder. He hadn’t been homesick in all the months on the road with Dean, but he is now, severed as he is from his deception of a mother. He wants nothing more than to be in his bed, waheela sleeping lightly, always alert, atop his chest, and Chal etching runes and Enochian sigils into tools they’ll use on future hunts at the dining room table.

The smell of the hotel room, musty carpets and industrial-strength chemicals, the artificial cold of the air conditioner, like wind blowing over ice cubes but concentrated to a fine point, and the familiar look of it, two queen beds separated by a dark wooden nightstand holding a metal lamp, little on-switch missing the cap, all of it is Dean. The pain hits Sam with such intensity that his eyes fill with burning tears. He’s never going to have Dean again, never going to slide under white starched sheets with him, never going to sneak out of bed at five in the morning to fill the little coffee pot with its single-serving packet of coffee so that Dean wakes up to the smell of it, never going to hold the tiny individually wrapped soap tightly in his hand, like a lifeline, while Dean kneels in front of him, oblivious to the shower water trying to drown him, too distracted by the mission of giving pleasure.

He’s shaking and the tears are flowing and Traci wraps her arms around him as he makes terrible coughing hiccup noises. She pulls him to the bed where they sit and though the angle is awkward, she still hugs him and he holds her too, desperate for the comfort even if he barely feels it. His heart feels like it’s actually broken, not just metaphorical damage, but like the organ is cracked and each beat is just weakening him, taking the blood from the places that need it and dropping it all around his chest. 

“There you go,” she whispers, hand running gently through his hair. “Just let it out.”

So, he lets himself bleed out, lets the pain just run away with him, lets it kill him if it wants. It isn’t like he has anything left to fight for anymore.

Like a baby, Sam cries himself to sleep.

* * *

Lawrence, Kansas - August 1999

Kansas is central enough to the layout of America that Dean finds himself driving through it fairly often. Lawrence, despite its proximity to Topeka, probably wouldn’t see Baby’s tires rolling across it as much if he didn’t have history here. He remembers Lawrence a bit, probably less than he thinks he does, but he remembers their old neighborhood, hopefully not just because of how frequently he ends up there. It’s a nice little suburb, one of a billion around the US, but the only one that has any meaning for him, the closest thing he has to home. The house didn’t burn down in the fire that took his mother, but it did lose a lot of the second floor. There’s probably not a lot left of the old house in the structure that stands in its place, but it looks pretty similar if his recollection is accurate.

He thinks about casing it or maybe just wistfully staring at it for the hundredth time on his way to meet up with Chal, but he agrees with her that they need to be covert about their presence here, in case Sam does show up. So, instead, he heads straight for the University of Kansas. Colleges and libraries are good places both to find information about historical events and to lure bookish teenage boys seeking said information. 

Chalendra is leaning against the rock that holds one of the many Jayhawk statues on the University of Kansas campus. They make for mundane sightseeing, but the Kansans here are stupidly proud of them to the point where some Kansas residents refer to themselves collectively as Jayhawkers. It has something to do with border raids, if Dean remembers correctly.

It’s only been a couple of months since he’s seen her, but she looks different, eyes darker and more haunted, maybe a little skinnier. She lights up when she spots him, though, and her arms immediately rise to hug him. He doesn’t even want to leave her hanging, needs to feel her acceptance of him as much as she needs to know that he forgives her. He swoops down and crushes her to him as though they’ve known each other for years and her arms around his waist feel so good he thinks he might die from it. He’s deeply moved by being able to have the experience. People who were raised with mothers and take this feeling for granted can kiss a duck.

“Oh, Dean,” she sighs into his neck. “I’m so glad you’re here.” 

“Me too,” he says, looking around at the few casually strolling students, not particularly caring who sees them. For all they know, he’s just hugging his mom. It feels like it, a bit. There’s not a lot of women that he would call friends and even less that he could hold without things leading to the bedroom. “How has it gone so far?”

She releases him for ease of conversation purposes. “There’s a house for sale two streets over. It’s not as close as I’d like, but it will allow for frequent check-ins. I’ve put in my bid already.”

Dean supposes it’s probably easy to come by money when you’re an angel, even a former one, but it’s a little impressive to just buy a house to keep track of your runaway son. “And do you have, like,  _ other _ ways to watch the house?” He doesn’t want to ask if she has any secret angel magic for spying, not here in the middle of campus, even if it’s deader than Calverton National Cemetery. 

She nods, brown eyes large, with angry red veins from crying. “I’ll catch you up on everything I plan to do. There’s a student cafe within the library. Shall we go there?”

“Sure,” he shrugs. He’s not here to take in the locale, so he’s not overly picky. They have to be where they can spot Sam if he walks by but not be standing out so obviously that he sees them first and runs. The caution is almost certainly unnecessary; he agrees with Chalendra’s prediction of Sam’s plans. Sam will wait until he thinks that Chal has cleared out. He’ll lay low until he can get in and get out without worrying that Dean will spot him and make him confront their accidental incest debacle. 

Chal’s pretty tall for a chick and she walks quickly, always seeming to have purpose in every body movement. Weirdly, it’s just them walking around, only an occasional human. “Is this place even open during summer break?”

“I was surprised as well, but there are some summer sessions; so, many of the facilities are still operational.”

The Roasterie has shiny blue seats, bright lights, and new-looking wood furnishings. When people talk about coffee on campuses, Dean tends to leap straight to a dimly lit, poets-on- the-microphone type place. The Roasterie looks more like a set from a sitcom. He feels ridiculous sinking down into the large chair with its high arms and vinyl-like texture. He hates college campuses. They make him feel like an alien visiting a planet of pampered beautiful morons. Even without the 18-year-olds sitting around discussing greek philosophers as though they were relevant and not just archaic pedophiles with nothing better to do than to talk out their asses, he still feels uncomfortable because this is a place that will never be his world. Real learning happens in real-time in real situations, not in front of chalkboards. 

Chal smiles at him, unaware of his discomfort. “He will come here eventually. I know it. I have been debating taking a janitorial job here as a way to stay in touch with the youth, though, obviously, it would be best if I did nothing but keep an eye on the house. It may be a year or more before he returns here.”

“Yeah, that’s a little long for a stakeout.” The coffee is damn good. That’s one area where he can’t reproach colleges.

She nods. “He’ll want to collect information. He’ll be trying to figure out if your father and mother have any remaining ties here, any relatives or friends.”

Dean shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Dad has contacts, but he doesn’t have many people that he’d think of as friends.”

“This was before Mary’s death,” she reminds him. She closes her eyes and sniffs, inhaling the smell of the coffee. Her nostrils looked chapped, more evidence of crying.

“Yeah, true, I don’t know what he was like before that. Dad doesn’t talk a lot about what life was like before. Does he with you?”

A moment of sadness flits across her face. Dean hadn’t asked how Chal’s confession had gone over because he already knows; Dad had been proving how well he can hold a grudge for the last sixteen years. She does answer, though, using the past tense to reference their calls. “I believe he was afraid to discuss her with me. I am not sure I understand who the fear was for. It could be he was afraid of making me jealous, as often happens when men discuss past partners, as I’ve read, or it could be that he felt guilty for dating me while she still has such a large part of his heart.”

Dean switches the conversation because it’s wandered into territory that makes him squirmy with discomfort. “Sam’ll hit up some old newspapers, so the library or the internet.”

“Right.” She’s just as okay as he is with leaving that emotionally charged BS behind. “Most of the things he needs will be in the library on microfiche. He’ll want to find if there are any articles relating to the fire, which I believe there are not, and he’ll want to find any signs of increased demonic activity in the days before the event.”

“Were there?” asks Dean.

“I doubt it. Raquel would have sensed them in Lawrence if they had been doing too much reconnaissance. Oh, Raquel was your brother’s guardian angel... and my garrison leader. They must have done some, but it would have had to have been subtle, so that she couldn’t sense it, and they certainly wouldn’t have been able to stir up trouble as they do, no plagues or severe uptick in public violence.”

She’d mentioned Raquel, an actual guardian angel looking over little Sammy, still in his crib, before. Of all the strange things he has come to know as true in his life, this is one of the ones he is having the hardest time believing. The world isn’t kind; it doesn’t care about your MS or your molestation or your mom burning to death while demons snatch your little brother. At least, this was the universe as he knew it a week ago. Now, come to find out there is a little bit of cosmic interference, protection of baby Sam. This makes him wonder suddenly. “Do I have a guardian angel?” he asks.

She studies her coffee, as though the answer to his question is swirling in its black depths. “Few have guardian angels. It was a special assignment.” 

Dean frowns. “Did they know that Azazel was gonna try and do that to Sam?”

Chal sighs. She looks around the cafe, not necessarily minding if they have an audience. They don’t; it’s just a handful of baristas chatting as they clean up kitchen messes and a man with eyebrows more bush than hair reading the paper. He suspects that she’s looking around to avoid eye contact with him, but she proves him wrong the next second when she answers. “No, not specifically. Your brother was always going to be special and both sides knew that.”

It’s weird to have her refer to Sam as his brother, true or not. He hadn’t even had time to adjust to thinking of him as a boyfriend though they’d been riding the rails of that one a lot longer. “Yeah, but why didn’t Azazel just try and gank him while he was still in the crib? Wouldn’t that have been easier than to try and steal him?”

“Because Azazel wants to harness that power.”

Right. Dean knows this. ‘One of Azazel’s Kids,’ that’s what the Vegas demon had called Sam. “So what is he going to use these kids for?” he asks.

Chal frowns. She’s genuinely worried that this demon might succeed; Dean can see that in her face and in the way she straightens up, chin lifting. “He’s creating an army for Lucifer to help him reign once he’s released from his prison.” With less confidence, she adds, “He might want them to help him achieve the release as well. The details of his plan are not known to me.”

Dean laughs. “There’s a devil, huh? I find that a lot easier to believe than angels.”

“Lucifer was an angel.” 

“Right, but he’s not like an angel with the fluffy wings and halo, right? He’s got the pointy stick and horns.”

“He might these days,” Chal says. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I ever met Lucifer. I only know of him. So, he might look twisted after his fall from grace, but then, I’ve lost my grace, and now I just look like this woman, the last vessel to grant me permission to reside inside her.”

Dean just keeps learning more and more. He’d expected to deep dive into their plans for how to find Sam, but as the afternoon passes on, and they shove more coffee down their gullets, he finds himself having a lesson about all the supernatural things he’d never realized were real. He’s not the note-taking type; it’d be easier if Dad was around to do that. No doubt Dad would have better questions for Chal too. He’s just too thrown off by all the secrets and hidden mythologies being opened up at once. 

When they part, Chal holds him so tight that it hurts. She’s lost more than just Sam, she’s also lost her first-ever love. Dean wants to believe that he’s different from her in that way, but he has little will to deny the effect that Sam’s had on his heart, not when he would do anything to find Sam again. It doesn’t matter if his boyfriend/brother is some kind of antichrist, Dean plans on getting Sam back even if he has to destroy the devil himself to do it.

* * *

Chesapeake Bay, Virginia - August, 1999

“Just come in already, dammit!” Traci hollers. Dotty, mistakenly thinking that she’s the one being chided, ambles slowly down the hallway of ugly brown carpet, looking between her mother and the man with the large friendly hands. She may not be in trouble, but she is a traitor, already acting like Sam is her owner; Sam never nursed Dotty back to health, never gave her a warm bed and a fully tummy. Traci continues to give Sam a look until he finally crosses the threshold of the apartment, a vampire cordially invited into her home. That resolved, she can turn her attention back to Mr. Sanderson and her new digs.

“It looks like it did in the pictures,” she says noncommittally. She’s already signed the papers, so it doesn’t matter what she thinks of it. “Anything quirky I need to know?”

When Mr. Sanderson doesn’t answer, probably because he’s too busy glaring at the dog and the teenager, she adds, “Do I need to turn the stove dial in reverse or keep a pot under any leaky pipes?” 

“No,” he says, making Sam look like a chatterbox. He’s holding a clipboard, but instead of offering it to her, he’s eyeing the boy. “Only you on the lease?” 

She nods. “Yep. He’s my nephew.” She resists the urge to say something like, “He’s not my mid-life crisis fuck toy;” this is her landlord she’s talking to, after all. She does have the foresight to add, “Though I’m going to give him a key so that he can walk Dotty from time to time.”

Mr. Sanderson looks at her. He seems unhappy with the idea of two people having access to his 650 square foot palatial estate. The place beats the hell out of the shitholes where she’s laid her head over the past twenty years in Cali, but his defensiveness of the property is irksome. “Or, you know, in case I die and Dotty has to subsist solely on my flesh to survive.” She should shut up, but if she knew how to do that, she probably wouldn’t be having to start over again in Chesapeake Bay. Judgment makes her nervous, makes her want to snap back at the people taking her measure. “Good for old cat ladies to have contingency plans.”

“You have a cat?”

Traci sighs. “No, no cats. It’s just an expression.”

Eventually, and it’s a long wait, the landlord gives a nod of his chin and extends to her the clipboard, like passing a holy baton.

She walks around the apartment, noting minor imperfections - a chipped countertop here, a cigarette burn in the carpet there, all while Sam stands around looking awkward. Dotty joins her, at times circling her feet but mostly just taking in the smells of former residents. Sam looks ready to bolt, she can see his anxiety just from the corner of her eye, so she tries to be quick about her notations.

While Mr. Sanderson looks over the marks that she’s made on the sheet, she bumps Sam’s shoulder with her own. “Pizza is on me. It’s the least I can do for your help getting the boxes in from the car.”

Sam considers, a minor decision war, the details of which she might not be privy to but that she can guess regardless. He wants to get away, probably to find a place to crash or start job hunting, but he’s a good kid, and he’ll help out an elderly forty-year-old woman. The supposed angel that raised him did a good job. Traci doesn’t have one ounce of belief in angels or demons, but she’d have had no friends in L.A. if she wasn’t willing to go with other people’s strange ideas of the way the universe works. Sam’s convinced himself that it’s true; no one’s that good of an actor. He needs help, like she had when she was his age, crawling into strangers' cars with the useless dreams of being the modern Jayne Mansfield. The stuff with his brother might be even weirder than all the demon talk, but it might be why the kid has to couch all of his trauma in metaphor. He wouldn’t be the first teenager to dream up some crazy excuses for the ugly side of family dynamics. 

“I can help with boxes,” he says, inner boyscout winning the fight.

Traci isn’t the gloating type. She’s relieved she gets more of an opportunity to talk to him. She intends to ask him to stay for as long as he needs. The second bedroom, her imagined art room, her makeshift dance studio, or even the where-all-the-crap-is-stuffed-so-tightly-that-you-don’t-dare-open-the-door room could serve a more important function for this kid. “Pepperoni and mushroom okay?” she asks. 

Mr. Sanderson interrupts. “Looks good,” he says nodding to the clipboard. He fishes out a key from his pocket. “Only grabbed you the one. I can have the other one tomorrow.”

“Or I could get like a hundred made at Walmart,” she jokes. “Really throw a great move-in bash.” That was too far. The fat serious man glares at her. She bats her eyes. “Kidding! I really am quiet as a mouse. Tomorrow will be great.”

Thoroughly expecting the apartment to be like Chernobyl the next time he comes back, Mr. Sanderson trudges down the hallway and lets himself out. 

Sam laughs. “You already made a new friend!”

“I have a knack!” She flexes both of her sizeable biceps towards him. “Ready to lift some boxes? I’ll order us up the pizza and then catch up to ya.”

  
  


It’s only after all the boxes have been brought in that they let Dotty out of the bathroom, having not trusted the lively beast with the prospect of an open door. She bounds around the apartment, stub of a tail wagging as she seeks out the new smells and objects that look brand new to her in this location. Traci laughs at the goofy creature and even Sam, doom and gloom that he is, smiles. “Thanks, Sam, for your help with this.”

He shakes his head. “No trouble.” 

“I thought about getting one that was already furnished, but that’s out of my price range right now, even with how much cheaper it is here than L.A. Plus, I like the idea of finding a sofa. I’m thinking a god awful floral one with some striped, oh, what d’you call those things that you put your feet on?”

“Ottomans? Ottomen?” He scrunches his face up. “I don’t know what the plural is.”

“I get the feeling that there’s not a fuck of a lot you don’t know.” 

She takes a seat directly on the carpet since there’s nowhere else to sit. Instantly, Dotty is shimmying her spotted rump onto her lap begging for love. It’s a good enough place and it’s all hers. She’ll be a little lonely here. Who knows how many of her friends will have also fled Chesapeake Bay in search of a better life? And those that are still here, well, they’ll judge her for failing probably. It’d be best to just start from scratch. She’ll find some friends who think it’s cool that she’s in the background scenery of one episode of Hanging with Mr. Cooper. Fuck ‘em if they don’t. 

She’s been distracting herself with Sam’s problems. His problems seem so much bigger than hers; she’s enjoyed having them dwarf her own fears about this move. Now, though, that she’s here in New Life Day One, she feels crazy uncertain about what comes next. 

“You okay?” he asks, boyish voice tinged with concern. What a gem this one is, to care about her while he’s having to hitchhike across the country to get away from his demons. His stance is tight, arms around himself like he’s expecting an attack. He hadn’t slept the last two nights, she thinks, though she’d certainly been conked out. Every time she’d shifted in her sleep though, the air in the hotel room had that vibe of someone being restless, and it wasn’t her. Moreover, it looks like he hasn’t slept. His skin is sallow or maybe it just looks that way with the dark tinge under his eyes. He looks positively haunted. Traci wishes she could do more to help. She’ll offer him food and then she’ll offer him board; he’s already got her friendship, but how much he accepts is going to be up to him. 

“You’re sweet to ask. A little nervous about being back here again. This place wasn’t great to me the first time around, you know? But then, I guess I can’t say Hollywood was either. I guess it’s gonna be whatever I make it.”

“You’ll do good,” he says. It sounds believable the way he says it, like he’s not worried for her at all, doesn’t need to be. Of course, that could just be because he’s too distracted with his own concerns, but he doesn’t seem like that type. He’s not the selfish type she’s become so used to. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know anyone here anymore. I’m used to living with roommates. I think I’ll be lonely.”

“You’ll have Dotty.” His defensive posture tightens. He knows she’s fishing. Well fuck it, she’ll try subtle, and she’ll try direct. Anything to keep this boy from getting into the kind of precarious situations which she could have found herself in when she’d been in his shoes. 

After the pizza is delivered they sit on the floor, leaning back against the wall while Dotty alternates giving them name-brand puppy dog eyes. Traci surveys the layout. “It’s not much but maybe I won’t fuck it up like I did Cali.”

She thinks Sam’s lips smacking on pepperoni serves as his response until he adds, “It’s hard not to fuck things up.”

She nudges him with her elbow. “Whatever. You’ll bounce back easier than you think. Hell, you’re just starting. You’ve got years of bad decisions ahead of you.” She hopes she’s right because with the amount of despair this guy’s carrying around with him... Well, she’s seen friends take themselves out of the running for good and none of them had it in their heads that demons were real. “You’re gonna crash here tonight, right?”

“Traci, I really shouldn’t.”

“They won’t be looking for you in Virginia and they won’t think you’d be set up with a place of your own already. Just take a few days to cry it out. You can get back on the road afterwards. Shit, you can just feel miserable with me for a while and then come up with a brilliant plan before you leave.”

She tosses a pepperoni at Dotty, though she knows she shouldn’t. It only rewards begging. But pizza is fucking delicious and everyone should get to have it sometimes. 

Sam looks at her, and she side-eyes him. “You have no self-preservation.”

“The fuck I don’t.”

“You meet a strange guy hitchhiking who tells you demons killed his mom and you want him to stay with you.” 

That is a very biased summary that makes her sound like a victim in a true-crime book. She turns to look at him fully. “I don’t believe in demons, but I believe in assholes. Someone hurt you and if laying low with me for a while will help you out, then why the fuck shouldn’t I offer? You’re not going to hurt me.”

He clenches his jaw. It’s not even stubbly, though she’s not sure he’s shaved since they’ve been traveling together. He’s just so young and so sad. “I could.”

“Well, no shit there. You’re like 80 feet tall and have a fucking gun in your pants.”

He pales and his eyes look away. Aha. He’d thought that she hadn’t noticed that. Honestly, she hadn’t until they’d been unloading the car just a couple hours ago, but she’s not going to admit to that, nor the deep drop she’d felt in her stomach when she had. It’s increased her urgency to help him, not to get him away from her.

“You won’t though. Even in your stories, you only kill bad things, right? Non-humans?”

“Yeah,” he breathes. He seems to be reassessing some things, probably assumptions about her. 

She flips the pizza box up and chucks in her crust. The action makes Dotty rise to her feet, only to sink back into a sitting position when she sees that she’s not going to get any more food. 

“Well, you’re homeless now and you’re going to have to learn to take what you can get. Stay. Stay til the end of the week. You won’t be mooching, cause I’m gonna make you help get this place set up. After that, well, you can go and find more demons.”

* * *

Lawrence, Kansas - November 1999

The only thing that the spell seems to have successfully accomplished is creating smoke, and it did so in abundance. Chalendra coughs and blinks through the sting in her eyes at the collection of ritual items within the hand-drawn sigil on the wood floor. She’d done everything right, correct intonations and properly charged objects, but the magic just hadn’t known who it was targeting. All of the ink she’d insisted Sam have needled into his skin is doing its job, blocking his existence from the knowledge of otherworldly forces. It’s good that it’s still working, but so disappointing that her spells keep failing. 

The distracting scratch scratch at the door finally breaks through her focus and she realizes she’s been hearing it a while. “Cujo! Leave your nails off the door!” The sound stops only a few moments before continuing. She sighs. Leave it to her to have raised a codependent feral monster dog. Getting off her knees is tricky as bits of her lower half have fallen asleep, but she totters upright. Double checking that the fire has been put out properly, she leaves the ritual/meditation room. 

A blur of white fur circles in front of her. Cujo whines. “You smell the smoke!” she says, surprised she hadn’t realized that would be a concern for the beast. She leans down and pets the top of its head. “Fire is not always a cause for alarm.”

The ritual room connects to the kitchen. Chal looks at the dismal old cabinets and the tiny window with its sun-blocking obscure glass. She hates this house and misses their Texas home so much that she can feel the taste on her tongue, coppery like blood. The place reflects perfectly how her life currently is; her existence is a rundown 3-bedroom with poor lighting, peeling vinyl flooring, rotting wood, and drab colors. Normally, she’d put some elbow grease into, repair the broken bits, replace the morose palette, but she doesn’t even feel like being cheered. Sam is gone. John won’t speak to her. Other than creating a Waheela rage cage, she has done no handiwork since she moved in. There’s no doubt that it’s only amplifying her bad mood, but she hurts too much to try to change it.

They’ve had no sign of Sam. According to Dean, the unofficial hunter network knows to keep an eye out. Sam hasn’t yet come through Lawrence. He hasn’t returned to the Texas house, not that the security installation has revealed, though she’s kept ownership of it just in case. As she’d expected he would, he just vanished. 

The way she sees it, he has two options given his personality. The more likely is that he will seek vengeance, going after Azazel only after he’s confident enough that he can bring him down. Sam is never cocky about his powers, always seemed to be reticent to use them; he won’t assume he can outright kill Azazel, not if Chal hadn’t sent him to do it already. The less likely option is that Sam just settled down, abandoning the hunter’s life completely. She knows he’s been unhappy with hunting, that he only did it out of a sense of obligation. She’d been suspecting for a while that he had designs to go off to college, leave her, and the life that she embodied, behind. This might have been just the impetus he needed.

She calls Dean, needing some brightness, anything to help her mood. He’s also the only human that’s speaking to her right now.

“Hey,” Dean answers.

“Hello, Dean. Do you have the ability to talk?” she asks. Cujo laps water loudly out of a large metal bowl.

“Yeah, of course. What’s going on?”

“The spell I tried today failed.”

“Bummer,” he says. 

Yes, that silly word is accurate enough. “Is your day…” she looks at her watch. “Is your evening going okay?”

“Dad thought maybe he had a possessed priest. Turned out to just be a pedophile.”

She uses his word. “Bummer.” It doesn’t suit, and she doesn’t intend to incorporate it into her everyday vocabulary.

“Yeah. Why do people still go to church? I mean, I guess it turns out that there actually is a god, but, like, his go-to guys tend to all be perverts.”

Chal very much remembers the deep sense of love she’d felt towards her god before she’d lost her grace. The closest she’s felt to it since falling would be occasional moments like watching Sam sleep where she felt the strength of her love was so innate, so inseparable from her being that it was nearly a divine devotion. As for church, she doesn’t know. It never was something that called to her. She felt no god there. “I only go to church for the holy water,” she says. 

“Yeah, that’s some good shit,” he agrees. 

They don’t talk long, Dean never seems particularly comfortable on the phone with her, but just the little bit helps. She cleans up the basement and prepares for another day of just trying.

* * *

Chesapeake Bay, Virginia - December 1999

Traci’s voice hollering from the living room is hard to ignore; she’s got those actress lungs that were meant for the stage. “Sam! Come on! It’s Christmas! You have to help!”

It’s probably for the best. He can see the blue rectangle of monitor glow when he closes his eyes. Still, he hates stopping now that he’s found this thread, now that his plans are branching out within his brain like a spiderweb being constantly woven. He disconnects from the internet, having saved everything he needs already onto the hard drive proper and as scribbled hand-written notes near the keyboard. 

He knows some of them now, or at least, he thinks he does. And he’s got a rough idea how to proceed. It’s almost time. 

“Sam! You’re not going to make me do this alone, are you?” The simultaneously shrill and raspy voice calls out again. His name suddenly has three syllables.

He rolls his eyes, but he’s not entirely without amusement, especially when he comes out of his room and sees the tree already locked into its screw-in base and Traci with sap-covered hands and a wide, bright smile. “Isn’t she a beaut?” she asks looking at her find. The pointy green top of the tree is folded over because it’s too tall for the room. It’s pretty massive for an apartment. 

“Gee Trace, didn’t you want to go for a large one?”

She leans down, picks up an ornament, and chucks it at his head. “Make yourself useful, smartass giant.” 

He catches it, reflexes as a hunter not so quickly dulled by a sedentary computer-based lifestyle. It’s an angel. He glares down at it. When he and Chal saw depictions of angels, silly ones like this one holding a bible and singing hymns, they would laugh together about celestial misconceptions, but he’d always be able to spot the wistful nature behind her laughter. All those years that she could have told him the truth, but no, she hadn’t even told him when his own family had shown up on their doorstep. 

He sets it down on a bookcase. “You’re supposed to put the topper on at the end,” he says solemnly.

Traci raises an eyebrow at him, picking up on his mood swing. As usual, it will have no effect on her own which right now is one of ebullient holiday merriment. “There’s no rules to putting up a tree! You’re too rigid.” She picks up a box of bulbs. “Wanna start with the bulbs then?”

“You’re gonna make me do this, aren’t you? It’ll be the only way you’ll shut up.”

She swings the red bulb by the small metal hook. “You are getting sleepy…” she intones. “You want to help me decorate the tree…”

He rolls his eyes again but picks up one of the many boxes in the room. “All right. You put the first one on, though, since it’s your tree.”

Her face lights up. “Oh my! The decisions!” She scours the boxes looking for just the thing. When she finds it, she squeals and puts it on the center front. “There, now you with your lesser decorating skills may add more!”

She already added a few touches of Christmas other than the tree. There’s a green and red table runner on the coffee table, some snowflakes stuck on the windows by plastic suction cups, and of course, there’s his personal favorite, the antlers that she bought for Dotty. He’s never really done holidays before, but somehow it’s still homey and comforting. He’s not sure how something that they didn’t celebrate can make him feel reminiscent, but he does. 

As he hangs, he probably ruins the mood. “I’m going to be looking for the other Kids soon.”

“What will you do when you find them?”

She’s not asking because she legitimately wants to know. She doesn’t think they exist. She wants to know what Sam will do when he fails to find them, wants to know how disappointed he will be, and wonders if it will be enough to jar him out of his delusions. Sam wishes he was delusional. It would make this thing so much easier. He could just start some therapy, take some meds, wouldn’t have to devote himself to obliterating something definitionally evil. 

“Recruit them,” he says. “I’ll stand a better chance of killing it if I’m not the only one fighting.” The reindeer made out of clothespins and pipe cleaners makes him smile. “How old are these?”

She squints, always sensitive about their age difference. “Never you mind how old these are, youngin’. And yes, I made that, so be gentle with it. My ma was super happy I was asking for these back. She said they took up too much room. Can you believe that? I give her artistic gold and she thinks it’s just clutter! Underappreciated by all…” she mutters to herself, placing a green bulb too close to another bulb. 

Traci fancies herself an artist, but she has no eye. Sam hasn’t drawn anything since the summer. Whenever he gets the urge to take pencil to paper, the torn out page of the Hunters comic that he’d left behind for Dean flits through his mind, withers the urge.

“Anyway, I’ve got a list of a few potential Azzy Kids. I guess it’s a matter of meeting them in person, maybe feeling out if they seem different.”

“And you think because they have your birthday, that they’re one of these chosen demon kids?” Her words sound skeptical, but she’s good at playing it off as nonchalance. Traci, as far as he can tell, has never judged him for what he believes, even if she thinks it’s impossible. He’s glad she’s lived a life that allows her to remain ignorant of the supernatural. 

“I’m mostly going with birthdays, yeah. One guy, the first one I’m going to hit up, he has my birthday  _ and _ his mom was killed in a fire when he was six months old. I don’t think the demon kills all the mothers though, so I got lucky finding that one.”

“Sam,” she speaks quietly. “Are you really going to find that poor kid and tell him all this? I mean, if you’re right, won’t you be dragging him into the same stuff you say you wish you could escape?”

She’s got a good point and perhaps before he’d learned the truth, he would never have considered involving innocents in something like this, but the thing is that he  _ did _ learn the truth. He doesn’t regret knowing. He regrets not knowing sooner. These marked ones don’t get to choose their past, but if he fills them in on everything, then they can choose how they deal with it. “Wouldn’t you want to know? If someone killed your mother and tainted your blood?”

Traci shakes her head. “Nope, not even a little bit. I like remaining blissfully in the dark.”

They are both quiet for a minute as Sam realizes that he is bringing the holiday spirit in the room down. He smiles. “You say that and yet you’re one of the nosiest people I’ve ever met.” 

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

She sticks her tongue out at him. 

“You act like a kid!” he accuses.

“I have to. You’re such a fuddy-duddy of an old man!” she counters. This is something he gets accused of often from her. 

It takes them about 15 more minutes of decorating before she busts out the tinsel. He advises her against it because of Dotty, so instead, she dangles them from only the top half of the tree which Sam thinks is just about the most perfect evidence that Traci doesn’t have an artistic bone in her body. When they’re done, it looks like the tree sneezed, mounds of shiny metal all on the upper branches. It’s an atrocity and he laughs a good hearty belly laugh at it. Though offended at first, Traci joins in. 

“I’ll miss you,” she says after their giggles abate. “You’ll keep in touch?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.” Her 5’7” frame is like a child’s when she goes to hug him. He can feel the pull of her hands on the back of his shirt like she’s clinging onto him. It feels like more kindness and love than he deserves… until he realizes that she’s putting tinsel down his pants. The two chase each other in a tinsel fight, one that Dotty desperately and loudly attempts to moderate. The battle is ended by the accidental collision of one size 12 foot onto one gold bulb. Shards of ornament embedded into his foot or not, it’s Sam’s merriest Christmas and not just because it’s his first.

* * *

Duluth, Minnesota - December 1999

With the snow piled up outside, Dean’s more or less stuck in the La Quinta Inn. It doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t want to be out anyway. The television isn’t grainy, for once, and it’s a Christmas free-for-all. He’s got George Bailey and Ralphie and Rudolph and they are all best friends with Jim Beam. What more could he need? It’s practically a holiday party. 

Deep down, Dean’s wondering if he’s going to survive this... not the shitty solo Christmas,  _ that _ he’s done before, but the empty void that Sam left in him. He hadn’t known how lonely he was before. He’d convinced himself that he was living the life, nothing but the freedom of the open road and the excitement of the hunt. Then, Sam had come in, and Chal. And there was this sense of family that just John couldn’t create, even if he had tried (which he didn’t). In retrospect, and he’s had a lot of time to spect the retro, his relationship with Sam had been pretty brotherly, kinky sex stuff aside. 

They’d joked around with each other, sparred a little bit. They’d been proud of each other, Dean because Sam was so whip-smart and could draw like a real comic artist, Sam because Dean could take down just about anything evil and was so comfortable socializing with people. Hell, they’d been supportive of each other, listening to each other’s problems and working on them. It was exactly how his fantasies went, the ones about what life would be like if his baby brother hadn’t been stolen. Sometimes they were slapping at each other in the back of the Impala, Dad growing pissier and pissier at their antics. They’d hunt back to back, shooting off gangs of monsters, moving like a team, like they knew each other’s styles so well that it was damn near telepathy. He wouldn’t have had to grow up so quick, because Sam would have kept him immature, happy, provided some foil to John’s stern cynical parenting. 

Sometimes in his fantasies, because Sam wasn’t abducted, John doesn’t become obsessed. He grieves the death of his wife but doesn’t take them on a wild goose chase around for her murderer. They’re raised like normal kids, in one place. This one is more uncomfortable, and it presents more problems than it fixes, the largest being that Dean doesn’t know who he’d be without hunting. These daydreams are less solid because he can’t even quite picture himself in them. There’s this gingerbread cut out of him doing all the things that he didn’t get to do: mowing lawns for extra cash so he can buy candy for Sam and toys, Super Soakers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for himself, scoring winning points in school sports with Dad up in the rafters with a proud grin, and spraining his ankle, not because a banshee had frightened him off a ladder, but because the branch of an apple tree had snapped while he’d been thieving fruit from a neighborly old woman’s orchard. 

Pipe dreams, all of it. He knew that. He’d pretty much figured Baby Sammy (he’s still having trouble reconciling the two figures in his head as one), was dead, but he never blamed Dad for continuing to look. Hell, it was comforting in a way, cause he knew that whatever took him out someday would have to face John’s vengeance. So, he’d known they were just dreams that couldn’t happen, would never happen. Until some of them had. Sam, alive, and smart-assed, capable, and familiar. 

He misses Sam in a real way and a symbolic way. He misses the little dip in the front of Sam’s tongue, how he’d feel it with his own when they eventually got to the kissing, though he’d noticed it long before that. He misses the gentle hands, smooth from schoolwork and playing video games, when they’d roam over his back or smack his backside in that playfully dominant charade he’d put on for Dean’s benefit. He misses what Sam represents too, a life he’d never believed that he could have. 

George Bailey grabs Clarence and demands to know where his wife is. “She’s an old maid,” warns Clarence. George has to see it for himself, tearing off to the library calling out Mary’s name like he’s gone crazy.

Dean wonders if he’s Sam’s old maid. Is his life this shitty because it didn’t have Sam in it? It hadn’t felt like a shitty life before. He’d had his problems with intimacy, that’s no lie, but it had felt like he’d done pretty well, played along with the hand he was dealt. He had a great poker face that way, had managed to convince even himself that he had a straight flush where there was only a pair of fours. 

He peers down with morbid curiosity at how much booze he has left. Plenty. There’s a second bottle in the impala either way. Yep, it’ll be him and George tonight. 

“Merry goddamn Christmas,” he says to the TV, lifting the bottle in a toast. 


	3. Recruits

Saginaw, MI - February 2000

Sometimes when things become overwhelming, which in Max Miller’s life is pretty often, he escapes to a rickety tin-roofed shed three streets over from his house. There’s a beech tree with the kind of limbs that cast spooky shadows in kids’ rooms. They twist so much that one branch has started to collide with the top of the rusty shed, pushing its roof up on one side. It makes for an easy nature-made ladder. From there, he looks out miserably over the world and thinks about how shitty everything is, how short-lived Earthly pleasures tend to be. Like, sure that pecan pie tastes good, but it gives you a stomach ache if you eat too much or even kills you if you happen to be one of the almost 1% of people who are allergic to tree nuts. That’s how life is. The bits of happiness are small and sometimes they end up being just as nasty as the things that make you sad.

Today hasn’t even been that bad of a day, no whack-a-boy games, no fellow student mockery, just a day. That’s enough. At least with the bad days, it justifies his feeling like this, like he wants to set fire to his home while everyone sleeps, or when he just wants to steal the key to his dad’s gun closet and give himself a final solution to all those cruel world things. It’s worse, feeling like a little bitch because he wants everything to end when it’s been a relatively “good” day. Good days don’t exist for Max. They never have. He just gets short reprieves of artificial pleasure, little flares of happy brain juices when he gets a toy he loves or when a teacher tells him that he’s written a great paper. 

The boy must have approached from behind the shed, from the direction of the farmhouse that belongs, he thinks, to Mr. Hamilton, because he didn’t see him come across the gopher hole-pocked field, only notices him once he’s ascending those gnarled tree limbs and thunked his rather large feet atop what Max thinks of as his shed, regardless of its erection on someone else’s land.

The boy is tall, with exaggerated limbs. He’s wearing a black t-shirt, no pithy sayings or logos, and jeans. His hair is long, his bangs brushing over sharp cheekbones. He looks to be about Max’s age. He’s ridiculously cute, like a model for the jeans he’s wearing. 

It’s with disbelief and deep offense that he watches the boy squat down into an Indian-style sitting position beside him. The tin clanks and groans beneath the extra weight. If he wasn’t feeling so intruded-upon, Max would be worried that the roof would buckle; it certainly is a possibility with the age of the metal. Instead, he glares at the boy, glaring as he does at the girls that spread rumors about him or the guys who yell names at him when he walks to class. Just like those incidents though, he doesn’t say anything and nothing comes of his glare. People only care about their own shit. They don’t have time to think about some fucked up angry teenager wishing they were dead; they have their own lives of simple fake joys. No one ever cares what he thinks, why should this stranger?

The boy is looking out over the farmland and eventually, his peaceful gazing outlasts Max’s ocular daggers. Max looks down at his shoes and he pokes at the holes there. If he wriggles his finger inside a bit, he can find where the holes in his socks are too, and touch his bare foot. Living the good life here in Saginaw. 

During the next few minutes, it has to be only a few minutes though time is stretching, Max fidgets. He pushes his hair behind his ear, clinks his bitten down barely-there fingernails onto the metal of the shed top, and tugs his sock up from where it’s been slowly scooting down into his shoe. The boy doesn’t move and doesn’t talk. There’s something weird about the way he just sits there, perfectly still. Max glances at him from time to time, though it’s obvious he’s looking so he doesn’t do so for very long. The stranger’s face looks serene like he’s meditating. It occurs to Max that he probably is meditating, though he’s never seen someone do it with their eyes open. Usually in movies, the person meditating is sitting on a little pillow and has their hands in some weird circle position with their eyes closed. Certainly, it can’t be normal for someone to do so on a tin roof while looking at acres of weeds and dried mud. 

Max watches more intently, notices the deep rising and falling of the boy’s chest, not like sleep, but calmly, like someone sitting on a comfortable couch in front of a boring TV show. Who is this boy? Max is dying with curiosity and yet reticent to actually ask, for fear that he’ll break whatever spell has been cast. Instead, he joins his gaze with the boy’s, out at the field, and feels his own breaths deepening. He wonders what it is that the boy sees. Is he even looking? Or is he looking inward, to that place that Max avoids like death? They pass what has to be 15 minutes like this, looking at but not truly seeing Hamilton’s field. Max doesn’t fidget but he also avoids internal reflection. Instead, he tries to just not think. The saying about not thinking about the pink elephant is only true so far, because sometimes Max succeeds. Sometimes, he catches himself not thinking about anything, and then his mind is back to the boy beside him or to thinking about how dinnertime will come too soon and he’ll have to return to those people who feed him in only the most basic of ways. Then, time will jump and he’ll realize that he hasn’t had a single thought, like his mind is in that limbo between two radio stations. 

A subtle change happens, an awareness comes back to the boy, and in turn to him. It’s like the boy is waking up and it stirs the return of reality back to Max. He looks at the stranger and jolts when he sees that the look is returned. The boy’s eyes look dark, but he can’t tell the color, and they look steady, determined. 

When Max was like six or seven, he went to this party where another kid’s dad was doing a magic show. They were little enough that everything seemed cool. It was years before any attempt to entertain would be met with mockery, suspicion, and sarcasm. Instead, the cheesy coin pulled behind the birthday boy’s ear was magical, truly created from air, and the everlasting string of scarves that just kept unrolling from the dad’s fist was a glorious enchantment. 

The strange boy, brunette hair flopped over one dark eye, raises his hand and from far below, something begins to rise. It’s a bag, just a backpack, standard in every way but the way it floats. It lurches occasionally, far from a smooth ascent, but still, there it is, pulled by nothing, seemingly, other than the stranger’s hand. He hadn’t expected someone to climb up and sit next to him out here and he hadn’t expected that someone to then use telekinesis. 

Once the bag lands, quietly but far from gently, Sam unzips it, and pulls out a water bottle. He takes a swig from it. Then, he reaches into his bag for something else. Max stares with wide eyes, like he was when he was six, and waits for the boy to pull out a rabbit. Instead, he pulls out a couple of apples. It’s more random than the rabbit. 

“Would you like one?” he asks, offering up the apple to Max.

It appears to be ordinary, just a yellowing red apple, medium-sized, stem still attached. “Why am I getting Snow White vibes right now?” Max asks, rhetorically. This whole thing is beyond suspicious, has completely crossed over to the realm of fairy tales, morality messages crouching behind creepy imagery. Beware of beautiful boys levitating fruit. 

“You can take it the same way I grabbed my bag, right?”

The boy’s eyes are calmly challenging; there’s something to be proven here. As for his own eyes, they still feel too wide, and like maybe he’s not blinking as often as a human’s should. 

“I don’t know how you did that.”

It’s a lie. The stranger knows this. His face remains patient, not annoyed, not skeptical. “I don’t even know if you like apples,” says the boy. 

“They’re okay.”

“Do you want to take it from me? You’ve probably never showed anyone what you can do.”

Max’s stomach tightens. It’s not shocking that this boy knows. It should be. He’s never lifted anything with his mind around anyone, tries not to do it at all. It scares the hell out of him when he does it. He’s not even sure how he does it, where the power comes from. It feels evil. Sometimes he plays with it anyway, tempting fate, tempting the devils that must be doing it to come for him. He has no soul anyway, not that he can tell. 

Infinite time stretches. “What do you want?” Max finally asks, voicing what he’d been wondering since this boy had first turned up.

The hand holding the apple lowers, as does the boy’s voice. “I want revenge. I want to destroy the thing that killed our mothers.”

Standing up isn’t a decision that Max makes, just something that he does. His face flushes red and he can hear his heartbeat loudly in his ears now. “Who are you? What are you talking about?” He doesn’t know the answer to the first question, but he does know the second, because there’ve been too many times when the alcohol soaks past the layers of his father’s anger, past the need to beat his fists into his son and into a place of infinite sadness, that his dad has talked about it. 

“The devil killed her” or “She burned up there, stuck to the ceiling,” little snippets of a memory so traumatic that it could only be found in the purest of inebriation. “They’d think I was crazy. Maybe I am,” he’d defend. Max hadn’t wanted to listen. “A devil was in the room with you two that night and he killed her because of you.”

The boy doesn’t even look him in the eye, doesn’t seem to acknowledge the adrenaline pumping through Max. He’s just rolling the apple around the palm of his large hand. “My name is Sam and 16 years ago, a demon lit my mom on fire, and I want to make him pay for that.” Then in a quieter voice, “And for everything that came after.”

“You’re crazy!” shouts Max. Had his dad rambled on to this strange kid? How else would he possibly know about his mom, or what his dad said about his mom anyway? He’d always lived in a strange place between not believing his dad, because it was a crazy thing to say, rambling about demons and fire, and believing because of the tone in his dad’s voice, the one that meant he was tired of pussyfooting around something. “Has my old man been talking to you?”

“Did you ever wonder what it would be like if she hadn’t died? How life could have been normal?” There’s a catch to this guy, Sam’s voice, and his eyes look shinier than they had, like he’s gonna cry. “We could have been normal, but the thing that did that, he changed us.” Sam locks eyes with him and sure enough, there’s some water around the lower lids of his eyes. “He made us something unnatural that night.”

The apple, still in Sam’s hand, rises up, jerky in movements but smoother than the backpack. It floats in front of Max’s face. Max glares at it, then down at Sam. “Let’s use it against him.”

“Him who?” demands Max. 

Three syllables sharply enunciated. “Azazel.”

“I don’t believe you,” says Max. A lie that floats between them just as the apple does. 

“I want to bring him down, but I can’t do it alone. You’ve got the powers too. So do others.”

“Others?” Max asks. It’s too much, too many things to think about. He’d never once suspected that these new dark talents that he seemed to be acquiring could be related in any way. The devil talk was just what dad did on rare occasions when he got too drunk. The knocking books off his shelves, locking the door from his bed so he wouldn’t have to get up, these were just him playing with something he shouldn’t. They weren’t part of a larger supernatural world where things like devils were real. “Just shut up. I don’t believe you! Just leave me alone!”

The apple taunts him by its presence, by its persistent hovering. He reaches out with his mind, grabs it, and flings it as far as he can into the field. It goes, well, a lot farther than he’d expected. He stares out into the distance, in wonder. His breathing is so fast now that he’s practically hyperventilating. Then, he sort of is, bending over and clutching at his chest as it works to pull oxygen into his brain. 

“I get a headache when I move stuff, but it gets easier. I think it works like a muscle.” Sam stands beside him. The roof beneath their feet groans angrily. He reaches out a hand, Max can see the movement, but he doesn’t touch him. That’s good. Max doesn’t like to be touched. 

“I don’t want this.”

“Then help me pay him back.”

Max looks at Sam from his lower position, feels intensely vulnerable. Then, a shimmer of something blooms in his mind, it’s an idea, but it doesn’t feel like his own, not that that makes any sense. A camp. A training camp. He sees people, faceless ones, just misty projections. They’re moving things: a car, a boulder. They’re standing in a circle around a demon. 

“These aren’t my thoughts!” wheezes Max. He sounds genuinely scared. 

“It’s my plan.”

“How many are there?” he asks, knowing Sam will know who he’s talking about. 

“I don’t know. A lot. He’s been doing it for decades. It has something to do with the devil.”

Laughter may be an inappropriate reaction, but that’s the path that his mind takes upon hearing that word, the one that his father uses on those rare occasions of what seems like either true madness or true honesty. Sam doesn’t look concerned by his outburst, still just seems intense and earnest, calm and focused, as Max giggles away like he’s wrapped in a white coat. 

Eventually, the defense mechanism of spontaneous insanity falters, and his laughter stops. There’s saliva in the corners of his lips that he wipes at with the back of his hand. God, he’d been frothing at the mouth; no overreaction there. 

“Sorry.” He has nothing to be sorry for, not really, but the apology comes out because he’s embarrassed to have reacted that way, ashamed to be slavering like a madman. “I thought my dad was lying.” It’s simple and not even close to the truth of the situation. So, he adds, “Or crazy.”

“November 2nd, 1983. Our batch was around that date, though you and I share it. It’s six months from when we were both born.”

“Our batch?”

Sam sits back down next to his less-than-magical backpack and the apple that hadn’t been hurled somewhere into the distance by Max’s outburst. “It made it easier to find you, but some others are just around the date. It could be that he chose us around conception and waited for us to hit the sixth-month mark. I’m... I’m not sure how it works yet. But, the more that we can find out, the better our chances will be when we face him.”

Max considers. His anger has been stoked daily by his family, but it lacks the pinpoint focus that some might assume it would have. It isn’t that he doesn’t want his dad and uncle to pay, but it’s more diffuse than that. He wants everyone who just let those two carry on their reign of terror to suffer. He wants the world who watches it happen, the world that judges him for his abuse having ramifications on his personality, to die. Lately, when it sparks, it’s thoughts about specific people - ‘I could push her off the bridge’ or ‘How would it feel to take a knife to his throat?’ but it’s never just one person. His dad and his uncle are his enemies, sure, but so is everyone else. It isn’t like anyone cares, like anyone looks past their own selfish needs to see how his life is going.

“You want to kill the devil?

Sam shakes his head. “No, it’s a demon. Azazel. They can be killed. I’ve done it before. This one, though...” he exhales loudly. “He’s powerful and he won’t be alone. He’s got....followers.”

“But he’s killing mothers.”

“And warping their babies.”

“Wow,” says Max. He too sits. The field out before them looks much as it did, though maybe a touch darker. That’s dinner time, the lurking unpleasantness that follows the lackluster days of school, sneaking up on him. Is there anything that he looks forward to anymore? 

This boy is offering him something, a purpose, a place to go. 

“How did you know that I can do that? With my mind? Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that I can.”

Sam stays silent. He’s been watching Max. Or maybe he read his mind. This is some dangerous X-men powers shit. Max isn’t quite sure why it hadn’t really occurred to him before to try to use those abilities. “I think we can learn to do more.”

“Is that how you killed a demon, with your mind?”

Brown hair shakes as Sam nods. “I did that stuff first. This moving things, that’s new. I’m still learning.”

Max realizes then, belatedly, that he can probably kill people with his mind. Unbidden, an image in his head appears, an axe flying across the garage and landing square in the center of his dad’s forehead. This feels like a dangerous realization. He feels distinctly unworthy and unprepared for the amount of power that this strange boy is identifying in him. Part of him rejects it. So far one of the most impressive things he’d done was throw an apple, hardly a supervillain-level action. Most of him hears the truth resounding through him. There is something in him, something dark, something powerful, untapped.

“I need to go home for dinner.”

“The apple not enough?” jokes Sam, he raises it up with his mind, perhaps wondering if Max will launch it far again. He reads Max’s face. “Will you join me?”

It’s harder, somehow, to grab the apple without the anger behind his action, but he does, moves it into his hand. It’s just an apple. He’d expected it to feel heavier in his hand. “I’m in.” 

Sam’s smile is too innocent for someone who seconds before had been talking about vengeance. Max understands now that Sam hadn’t known what the answer would be, that maybe he’d only been meditating because he’d been nervous. Sam doesn’t want to do this crusade alone. If what he’s saying is the truth, he might not even be capable of doing it alone.

Max should want vengeance. He’s thought about it plenty, with ever-escalating frequency these days, but he wants something else more. He wants to have an effect on the world around him. He hates how little he matters to everyone. Maybe if he can stop this evil thing, he’ll matter.

* * *

El Paso, Texas and Truth or Consequence, New Mexico - August 2000

All of Dean’s life has involved searching for someone. Years and miles spent riding shotgun in the black Chevy Impala while Dad hunted down the demon that killed Mom. Then, he was behind the steering wheel hunting the demon that killed Mom and following rumors about things that go bump in the night so that he can kill them, save innocent people. Now, he’s 21, and he’s looking for the demon, the bumpy things,  _ and _ his baby brother, the piece of his soul that had reunited with his own for such a brief time. 

At this exact moment, Dean’s search is for the big bottled water that rolled somewhere beneath Baby’s bench seat. It’s wedged too far under for Dean to grab while driving, even when stopped at a light. He curses when he realizes this. The damn thing hasn’t even been opened yet, might still be cool from its former home at the gas station, loudly stamped with its neon 99¢ sticker, a stark contrast to the snooty name brand waters with their blue labels featuring cartoon water droplets or cascading waterfalls. No pretenses for a 99¢ bottle, but that suits Dean just fine; he’s a 99¢ kind of guy.

He’s thirsty enough to start eyeballing highway turnoffs. It’s not like he’s in a rush anyway. Chal advised them against seeking out Azazel without the benefit of Sam’s powers, so the only two tasks that fill his life these days are rescuing locals and following Sam leads. Technically, it’s more of trying to create Sam leads because they don’t have shit. They’ve got every hunter across America on the lookout, even some across the Northern border. Of course, all they know is that a hunter’s kid went missing so there’s only so hard that they’ll try. If they knew the truth, they’d probably view him as a bounty to be brought down, just like Sam had feared John would see him. 

Chal’s got Lawrence bugged like Nixon’s hotel, ready to alert them the instant that Sam returns. She’s certain he’ll have to see the charred remains of their family home someday, but sweet god is that obstinate kid taking his sweet time about it. One year tomorrow. Dean is acutely aware of the anniversary of Sam’s departure.

When he does pull off the main road, he contorts his body into a man-pretzel hybrid to obtain the holy grail water bottle. The bottle’s a full liter and when he pulls off from it panting, it’s down to nearly half. Guess pulling off had been the right call. His belly is gonna be sloshing like a damn water cooler. He dials up his dad.

“Any hunting lodges near El Paso?” he asks.

Dean pulls out a map from the glove compartment. He’d bought it right after Dad gave him the Impala. It went against his pride, but who was to know now that it was just him on the road? The only passengers he’d had in it were a vic who was in too bad a shape to drive and Sam. Both had gotten their fluid on Baby’s seats - the blood was harder to wash out. 

“Sanctuary. Town called Truth or Consequences. South on 25.”

“For real?” his thumbs ask. Who names a town Truth or Consequences? They’re just begging for some bad supernatural juju with a name like that. He doesn’t wait for a response before maneuvering Baby back onto the road.

“Changed in the 50s cause of a game show,” says Dad. He must be bored to offer up trivia. “Give my regards to Will,” he says and hangs up. Not that bored, then.

Sure enough, there the town is. Truth or Consequences population 7323. There is a lot of shit in the world that Dean doesn’t understand, and he is willing to chalk this up to one of those.

The sign for Sanctuary, the New Mexico hunter’s lodge, is much smaller than the ones advertising cheap beer and there are no less than six of them spread over the vertical planks of the bar’s siding. There’s a cinder block directly to the side of the entrance, ready at a moment’s notice to be used to prop open the black security door. Spider webs thoroughly coat the floodlights above the door. The orange word closed pisses him off, as though it’s the word itself and not the state of the bar that bothers Dean. He checks his watch and nudges the cinder block with his foot. It’s a little after 3. He won’t have to kill too much time; he figures that if he lived in a town called Truth or Consequences, he’d start drinking before 5. It’s a guess, though, because there’s no handy list of the hours on the water-logged wood wall of the building.

He stands around for ten minutes, having a nearly zen moment watching the passing cars and listening to the wind make the nearby trees into maracas, when the heavy metal door squeaks loudly, swinging outward. A gal with red curly hair pops her upper body out of the door frame. “You can come in early if you want. I’m still setting up.”

Before he can respond, she ducks back inside. He grabs the door before it can slam back into place, following her.

There’s a plastic Christmas tree set up in one corner like it isn’t August. A giant Jesus hangs bloody beneath one of the large TVs on the wall. Every piece of furniture in the place is wood, crappy wood, and it looks more like a really religious log cabin than a bar. Recognition tickles at his senses; he’s been here before. While he tries to figure out when and under what circumstances he’d been here before, Redhead straightens stools, wipes at the tops of the aging tables, and grabs a few salt and pepper shakers to refill. 

“Can I help out?” he asks, surprised by the sense of nostalgia. When you spend your life on the road, even just being somewhere twice can make you feel like you’re home. 

“Nah, I’m good,” she says, moving clean glasses into stacks behind the bar. “Actually… you wanna get those TVs on?”

He starts with the one above the bar, has to stand on tip-toe to get it, so there’s no telling how she gets this one. Immediately, the sound of sports commentary blares, filling the room. The second TV is trickier because of its position above the Christian lord and savior. Dean may not be a fan of the big man in the clouds, but he knows well enough that pissing off sacred objects is a bad idea. He maneuvers carefully, hitting the button without knocking down the cross. The light comes on above it, though, like a modern star of Bethlehem. Apparently, the Knicks are leading the inebriated to Christ. 

He returns to the bar, ready to lend a bit more of a hand than easily pressing buttons, but she looks less in action now, perusing a notebook next to the register. She looks up at him. “Thanks. I have to jump to get ‘em.”

“Ever heard of a remote control?” he asks.

She smiles. Her face is slender, her lips wide. She’s stupidly beautiful. Like, the kind of pretty that doesn’t need makeup. She’s young too, probably about his age, no older than 25 at most. “You can’t keep something like that in a bar. It takes, like, a day and a half before some drunk asshole chucks it or takes it. Some people just like to steal shit, even if it’s something that they can’t use.” 

He sits on one of the stools. It’s unpadded but his ass isn’t prissy. “Was at one bar in Tulsa that attached theirs to the TVs with bungee cord.” He smiles. “Then someone cut through it with a knife so they just had all these TVs with bungee cords hanging down.” 

Redhead rolls her eyes. “Sounds about right. I’m not supposed to serve you til we’re open. What’ll you have?”

He looks around the countertop at several laminated paper triangles with the ads for different beer options, chooses one at random. She fetches it for him, easily breaking either the bar’s rules or the local beer law. As she lines up the mug under the tap, he notices a hand-painted sign that reads “The Lord is the only thing mightier than my hunting rifle.” Again he gets that deja-vu; it’s almost like being drunk.

“I’ve been here before,” he says as she turns back to him with a full mug.

She sets in front of him, breasts perkily framing the brew. “Not recently.”

He shakes his head and spins around with the beer in his hand. He spots the kitchen, and he is overwhelmed by a memory. 

Dad was talking to a fat man and Dean’s stomach was past the point of empty. He’d even mentioned it to Dad in the car, casually of course, so that it didn’t seem like whining, and Dad had assured him that they could get something to eat when they got there. It never really mattered where “there” was, not until he got older and knew he’d be having to map shit out for himself someday. By the time he was standing there, in this bar, watching the two grown men greet each other, he’d felt like he could have eaten his own arm. The man, probably Will, had seen something in his eyes, or his stance, maybe had heard his stomach, because he’d grabbed a stool and urged John and him to follow into the kitchen. Once in there, he’d spoken to Dad while whipping Dean up a ham and cheddar melt. The stool, it turned out, was for Dean to sit on while he devoured the buttery cheesy goodness. It had been one of the best sandwiches of his life. It had filled his belly with a greasy weight that made it possible for him to wait out the rest of the hunters’ conversation. Will had joked about how fast the food had disappeared and tossed him a small bag of chips. Dean had never had to ask and as far as he knew, Dad had never paid for the meal. Looking now at that kitchen, he can practically taste the gooey cheese and feel the warmth from that small act of kindness. 

“I think I was nine, ten,” he whispers, more to himself than the woman. “He… he made me a sandwich once. Grabbed a stool and let me eat it right back...there.” He points to the kitchen. “Will, right?"

Her lips smile but her eyes don’t. “That’s right. Good memory for a nine-year-old.

He tries to snap himself out of the magic of the memory, the deep gratitude he’d felt for the random bar owner. “Yeah, well…” he drinks some of the beer. It hits the spot. He feels embarrassed now, having let her see the sparkle of that happy memory telegraph itself across his face. “Does he still own the place?”

“Died four months ago,” she replies casually, no doubt having presaged the question. “Don’t say ‘sorry.’” He still wants to say it, but instead, he sips his beer. This time her smile seems more genuine. She leans down on her elbows, fists under her chin. “He was good with kids.”

Her ears have two sets of piercings. The upper ones are tiny little crosses that are nearly swallowed up by the cushion of her lobe. The lower ones are silver dollar-size hoops. Her hair is up in a messy collection on her head, but a few strays curls frizz around her face, one of the strands looping through the hoop on her left ear. Perhaps because he’s staring at it, she swings her index finger through the loose side bits of hair. 

“Seemed like a good guy all around.” He hears the tenderness in his voice. Maybe that conveys his condolences without letting the actual words slip out. “Made a mean ham and cheddar melt. Did he die on a hunt?” Dean asks. 

Some hunters act like Vikings aiming for Valhalla, getting all horrified if their buddies biffed it to disease or accident rather than fighting monsters. Dean’s adopted Dad’s philosophy - once you’re dead, the ‘why’ doesn’t much matter. There’s the exception of ghosts, of course, but for the most part, it doesn’t make a difference whether you died saving a bus full of kids or taking a tough shit. Dean would rather go out with a full belly and a spent dick, but he’s not one to waste a lot of time on wishful thinking. Too much time with your head in the clouds can get your body six feet under in a hurry.

“Heart. You’ll remember he was a big man?”

He nods. Will’s face may be a blur but his size, the way his fat had waddled as he moved, was memorable. “Guess he liked ham and cheddar melts for himself, too.” 

She smiles in confirmation. “And cinnamon rolls and Dr. Pepper and tater tots. If it was unhealthy, he couldn’t get enough of it.” 

There’s a part of him that regrets that Dad never brought him back here again, that he couldn’t have spent more time in the kind fat man’s kitchen. It occurs to him that he should introduce himself. He offers up a hand first, adds “I’m Dean Winchester.” There’s a chance that she’s heard of Dad, though he can’t tell by her eyes, doesn’t see recognition, but she also seems a bit tangled up in her reminiscing. Four months isn’t a long time, as far as grieving goes.

She extends out her own hand. “Willa Bailey.” Dean chuckles, the pieces sliding into place. Her lovely face appears defensive, but light-heartedly so. “Beats bein’ called junior.”

Dad doesn’t trust other hunters much, but Dean’s found that he can instantly form a connection with them. He never sees snooty hunters; they’re always people like this gal who, instead of using her good looks to rope some rich guy who’ll take care of her, mops up whiskey puke in a shithole with bars on the windows. Even Chal, who used to live in goddamn Heaven, always has fingernails crusted with dirt. Hunters do those things that no one else wants to do. So, it’s unsurprising that he already likes Will junior.

“If you’re looking for leads here though, I got none. I mean, you wait around long enough something’ll pop up; this area is a magnet for monsters. Most of the locals, though, come find me when it does. Can’t always wait for a traveling hunter to come through, though I’m busy enough here, I don’t mind outsourcing.” Her As are long, and many of her Ls have a U sound intertwined in them. It’s probably regional. 

“Nah, just looking for company.” 

She raises her head off her hands, studies him, and purses her lips, brain in obvious decision-mode. “Sure, what the hell? We don’t open for…” she looks down at the watch on her wrist. “Fifteen minutes. You can get the job done for both of us in that time if you take directions well.”

There are precious few times in his life that Dean’s felt himself blush, but he does so now like a pro. He backpedals. “Whoa! I didn’t mean that… I mean, well, I wasn’t trying for that. I was just thinking, you know, company, conversation.” Her eyebrows raise and he realizes that he’s looking a gift horse in the mouth. “I mean, not that I’m saying no…”

“Dean.”

“Yeah?” he asks, nervous about how this is going.

“In a few hours, this place will be full of plenty of conversation.” 

The telltale sound of the big metal door creaking and clanking interrupts whatever either of them might have said next. After some jostling of a key in the lock, the smaller wooden door opens and a Mexican guy with a dirty blue baseball cap joins the party. “Hey Crackerjack!” he says, his hair-smattered chin tilting upwards in greeting. He leaves the door unlocked behind him, maybe signaling the bar’s opening.

Willa sighs. “Well, it was a good idea, anyway,” she says lightly. “You come ‘round after closing and we’ll see if I’m still in the mood?”

Dean pauses, but then says, “Sure.” He’s not, but that’s about the only thing to say when a good-looking woman extends an offer to take you to bed. Hopefully she’ll be too tired or he’ll be too drunk and he won’t have to provide the real reason why he’s not sure he should accept.

It isn’t that Dean isn’t attracted to her and sex has absolutely been on his mind, pretty much constantly at this point, but the idea of sex with someone that isn’t Sam feels wrong. Doing those things with Sam, well it had been the first time in his life he’d been doing them for the right reasons. He doesn’t want to go back to offering his body up for scraps of attention. He wants to be in bed with someone that knows him. He wants to be in bed with Sam, but he’s still AWOL, and it’s looking more and more like Dean’s holding out in vain.

“Hey man, is that your car?” The guy is right at his elbow, personal space not something he seems overly worried about.

Dean grins, the instinct to brag about Baby greater than his annoyance at the interruption. “Sure is.” 

“She’s real cherry, right?” He offers Dean a fist. Dean reciprocates and they bump top to bottom and bottom to top. “How’s a young guy like you come by wheels like that?” He turns to look at Willa. “The guy has some money, eh?”

Willa snatches back up the hand towel she’d been using to wipe down tables. “No idea, Miguel. Maybe you should ask him for his bank account information?” She drifts off, puttering around what looks like an already setup bar.

He and Miguel talk cars for the next 25 minutes until even Dean’s reaching his interest’s limits. That’s around the same time that a patron enters the bar and Miguel excuses himself to get the kitchen ready. The new bar patron, a guy in his late fifties, doesn’t even have to order, Willa already knows what he wants. Something tells Dean that he also always takes that same table, the one with a good view of Jesus’s TV. Dean can never quite shake the feeling that he’ll end up a barfly, that is if he can keep his ass from getting ganked by something with sharp claws and big teeth. It’s not the greatest thought in the world either way.

He gives a nod to Willa when he leaves the bar. He isn’t sure if he’ll return tonight, hasn’t made his mind up yet. All he’d wanted was to swap hunting stories with someone, not have to decide how willing he is to put a nail in the coffin of his relationship with Sam. He knows, logically, that it was Sam who ended things the night he ran away, but his heart isn’t so sure. Dean wishes they hadn’t gone to Vegas, that they could have kept living forever in that blissed-out summer. They wouldn’t know they were brothers. They’d know only that they’d found someone that they could count on, someone to watch shitty movies with, have orgasms with, those sorts of things. He’s spent his whole life looking for the kid, and, lover or brother, it doesn’t matter. He’s gonna find Sam and he’s not gonna let him go.

* * *

Azzy Camp - North of White Lake, Wisconsin - August 2000

Max rubs at his temples, eyes in little pained slits, their corners tilted up as his skin pulls. “Do you think we’ll ever develop healing powers?”

The weather is perfect today, as it has been the rest of the week, which provided them the perfect opportunity to finally make the four-hour drive down to Lake Geneva Tattoo. That was the closest parlor to the camp, wedged as it was between a national forest and a native reservation, and despite feeling isolated where they were, Sam was reluctant to risk too many outings outside. There might be time for that later when they have a better grip on what they can do. For now, it’s once a week to get groceries and for Sam to spend all day on the nearest library’s computer to try and find every Azzy kid he can.

Scott’s got his nose in a book, as usual, and he doesn’t look up as he asks, “The tattoo hurting that much?” They had flattened the top of a fallen tree with an ax, turning it into a sort of makeshift couch that is tilted at an angle and only comfortable with the addition of several old blankets that had to be carried inside one of the lean-tos during rain. Scott’s feet are on the low end for now, but he tends to rotate as he reads, shifting his blood flow like a sand timer being reset. More than once Sam has come out of the barracks (a three-person shed constructed primarily from sheet metal with a fancier name than it deserves) in the morning and found that Scott had just slept out all night. He insists that the unholy number of mosquitos are no worse outside than they are in the barracks anyway, but his skin sports more little itchy red dots than the others.

“No, he’s got another headache,” says Sam. He’s carving sigils into a piece of sheet metal, the gentle scrape sound providing a harsh counterpoint to the birds trilling in the trees around them. Sam’s the only one that didn’t have any needles in him today, already loaded up as he is on his subdermal protections. 

“I doubt that demon blood would transfer something like that. Seems more angelic,” says Scott.

Sam frowns at the mention of angels. He wonders if he’s always going to feel that drop in his stomach when he hears about them. It certainly hasn’t gotten better in the near year since he’d had his falling out with one. 

“The tattoo didn’t really hurt,” says Max. “Or, maybe I’m just used to worse.”

“They burn a little bit, like a sunburn.” Sam knows that it depends on the location and the artist how bad they hurt. There’s always discomfort, just a light pulsing sometimes where the blood rushes to the area. “The ones on bones hurt.” 

“Well, I’m glad they gave us Saran wrap,” says Scott eyeing his new tattoos proudly. He’d gotten them both on his skinny arm and the way he looks at them, Sam can tell he thinks he looks like an action movie star. He’d started them off with a demon ward and an angel ward. They’d been long overdue for both, having been at the camp for 3 weeks now; they should have done it right away before hoisting the first building. “I can only imagine how infected they could get out here.”

“We have plenty of sanitizer,” assures Sam. 

“Think the tattoo will help with picking up girls?” Scott grins at Sam. 

Max laughs. “Yeah, try telling them you’ve got protection. Just don’t mention that it’s an anti-demon sigil instead of a rubber.” 

“Having superpowers should help you get girls,” whines Scott. “And here I am with two dudes in the middle of the woods.”

Sam blows some of the metal away, then runs his fingers over the etchings to get off the shavings. He’d carved protection into everything in the camp, not that there’s much yes but they’re going to keep expanding, if Sam can help it. 

“We only have one more nursery fire kid - and he’s male,” says Sam. 

“Of course he is!” 

“Scott, this isn’t a dating service,” reminds Max.

“Easy for you to say, Max. You…” starts Scott. 

Max interrupts him. “When are we gonna try the last one, Sam?”

Sam’s been wondering that himself. The sooner they round up everyone, the more time they’ll have to train. Already he’s seen progress in all three of their powers and it’s only been a handful of months. Given a group of, say, ten, over the course of a year or two, he imagines that they’ll be able to tear through Azazel’s forces like tissue paper. Of course, two of this trio have never killed, never even faced a demon in their lives. They’ll need to. When Sam learned how to snuff out demons, he’d had an angel for a bodyguard - even Chal without her powers was more formidable than any human he’d ever met. This gang would have just Sam. Hopefully, that would be enough, because they’ll need to start learning how to hunt demons soon. He wishes that he had factored in the camp’s distance from urban centers. He’d wanted something out of the way so no one (particularly Yellow Eyes and Dean) could find them. He’d searched diligently to find forest land that wouldn’t often be patrolled by the National Park Service. He’d hit pay dirt here, but now who knows how far they’ll have to travel to find a demon. They’ll need to relocate but since they’ve been here such a short time, he’s really not looking forward to sharing that with Max and their new recruit. He figures there’s no harm in waiting another month or two, trying to rustle up a larger group before worrying about that.

Sam wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his dirty hand. He turns his mind to Max’s question. “He’s in Oklahoma. That’s a two-day drive. We’ll want to case him for at least one too. We can go this week, if we can come up with enough gas money for the trip.” 

“Sucks that this is our last nursery fire,” says Scott. “How hard will it be to find the rest without that key?”

A good question. “Dunno. I have noticed that I can feel something different about Max and you. We might have to go by sense more than anything.”

“Just wander down the street and read auras?” asks Max with more snark than he normally does. He’s grouchier when he has a headache, so Sam tries not to get too irked by the attitude. 

“If that’s what it takes.” It won’t come down to that. He tells them as much. “We’re not going in completely blind. We’ve got access to the internet. We can find patterns. I’m sure there’s more than just similar ages. I’ve been thinking that I should check out our hometowns for signs of increased demonic activity when we started nearing the six-month mark.”

“They have webpages for demonic activity?” asks Scott.

“My point is, we’ll find more.” He’s certain that he’s right. They will find more, hopefully lots more. His biggest worry is that it will take them too long and that whatever plan Azazel is hatching will already be well underway by the time they can form their army. 

His confidence as a leader seems to have the desired effect as Scott turns back to his book. He reads for a while more then looks up again. “Make sure the one after this next one is a girl, okay?” Sam makes no promises.

* * *

Guthrie, Oklahoma - August 2000

“No thanks, guys. I’m pretty set.” Andy Gallagher sucks milkshake through a large white and yellow straw as a means to punctuate his perfect life.

Sam’s jaw juts forward and then back, immediate disappointment and an unproductive anger kicking in. Max is well aware of what that jolt of anger feels like, has been experiencing it nearly his whole life. For Max it then gets added to a mental pile, kindling for the stack that if he were ever to light it, could burn the world down to ashes. For Sam, who doesn’t seem to be used to it, his reaction is to argue, to try to change the thing that made him mad in the first place. “What are you saying? You’re just fine with how your mother died?”

“Adopted mother, and yeah, dude, I wasn’t even a year old. I didn’t know her or anything.” Andy doesn’t sound defensive, just really chill. He’s the easy-going kind of person who just lets a group of three strange guys take him to a fast food place to buy him a milkshake. He’d been disbelieving, Max isn’t even sure if he believes them now, but he doesn’t seem concerned with their claims nor with their knowledge of his childhood tragedy. 

Sam opens his mouth and then closes it, obviously too stunned by Andy’s response to come up with anything resembling a retort. 

“What about when it comes for you?” asks Scott.

They don’t know that the demon is coming for them, certainly it won’t in the way that Scott’s insinuating. If Azazel wants an army of psychic kids, it’s not going to kill them. He’ll probably entice each one of them, much in the same way that Sam is doing, or better if it’s guys like this that it has to convince.

The Arby’s that they’re in is at about half capacity, not bad for mid-afternoon on a Saturday, but not good for conversations about murdered mothers. Most of the tables have children at them, loud with feet swinging in their chairs as they stuff their faces with thinly sliced beef and make straw wrapper blow darts. Max will never enjoy seeing happy families; he has way too much envy for that. 

Andy shrugs. “I suppose it’ll eat me or whatever demons do, but guys, I’ve gotta tell you; it’s not something I’m worried about, you know?”

Sam scoffs disbelievingly. “You know that this stuff is real! We showed you what we can do!”

That’s all it had taken to win Max and Scott over, but then they had very different lives. Both had been eager to leave their shitty lives behind. Looking back, Max worries about how easily convinced he’d been. He knows Sam now, knows that he’s a good guy, but if Azazel had gotten to him first, demon or no, he’s pretty sure he’d have joined up. It’s an uncomfortable thing to know about himself. 

The magic levitation trick Max had done and the mind-reading Sam had done obviously weren’t enough to disrupt this new guy’s complacency. The threat of an evil entity isn’t doing it either. 

“It’s not that I don’t believe you guys. I just… you know, I have things going on here.” The sound of Andy’s milkshake slurping is sure to drive Sam over the edge into some kind of breakdown. Max hopes that he doesn’t have to talk Sam out of an abduction plot that’s brewing behind his overly tense eyes. “Tell you what though, why don’t you leave me your number or something. If this Azazel guy shows up, I can call you.”

Sam’s chair squawks loudly as he pushes it back from the table and stands tall and angry and glowering down at Andy. “You don’t understand anything!” he spits out before striding to the door of the Arby’s and leaving without a glance back.

Max bites his lip. He gives an apologetic look to Andy who still looks unfazed. “Let me write down Sam’s email address for you - we change phones a lot.” He scribbles it down on a napkin after asking one of the cashiers for a pen. As he hands the world’s least professional business card to Andy, Max says in a low voice. “This really is a thing though, and you’ll have to face it eventually.”

He’s used to apologizing for someone else’s bad behavior. 

Scott and Max shake the trash from their trays into the bins before following Sam. “We’re still 2 for 3,” says Scott. “Good percentage.”

Neither of them mentions how hard it’s going to be to find more Azzy kids. Sam’s got leads but they’re soft ones, ones that mean a lot of false starts. They’ve got a long road ahead of them, and not just in terms of actual miles.

* * *

Random Hotel - Summer 1999

“You trust Sam,” Dean thinks as he fishes boogers out of his nostrils, then twice as he showers, and four more times while he skims the morning paper. By the time he’s taken up the task of alternately tapping his left foot and drumming the fingers of his right hand on the round table while staring out the window, the words are a mantra, a song without melody but just as catchy as any of the overplayed Spice Girls songs he tries not to hear on the radio or inside fill-up stations.

Finally, Baby pulls up, engine purring powerfully, body intact and safe, into the parking space in front of the door, and Dean breathes again. He knew he could trust Sam.

He’s been planning on playing it cool, but still finds himself jumping to the door, ripping it open, and asking, “What took so long?” before Sam even gets all the bags out of the Impala. These Sam uses as a sort of cowcatcher, pushing the crinkling plastic against Dean’s belly so that he can enter the motel room.

He places the three bags on the bed, starts digging around in them. He pulls out some XL gardening gloves and AAA batteries. “This town sucks; that’s what took me so long.”

Dean sneaks a peek out at Baby one last time, no dents visible, before shutting the door. When he turns, Sam is in front of him, smiling and offering up a pink box that can only mean one thing. “Took me forever to find a donut shop.”

Sam’s smile transfers to Dean who snatches up the cardboard, lifts the lid, and takes a deep whiff of the deep-fried confections. “Knew there was a reason I kept you around, Sammy.”

“Yeah, well, save me a maple bar. I’m gonna wash up.” Sam turns towards the bathroom but Dean reaches out, grabs his wrist.

“You might wanna hold off on that shower.” Dean lets his voice go low. “Might have some plans for the icing.”

Mornings were never this good before Sam.

* * *

Saginaw, Wisconsin - January 2001

Dean glares at the donut box; its pink is offensive, taunting. He can almost hear it goad him,  **Remember when you were happy, Dean** ? Fuck the box, fuck donuts, and fuck the memories of Sam being deliciously coated in Bavarian cream underneath his tongue. If he opened the box, took out a donut and ate it, it wouldn’t taste like Sam, would taste like Styrofoam, like everything else these days.

“Would you like one? I can’t say as we have any jellies left. Robertson usually grabs those first thing,” says the police officer. Then, in a lower voice, she adds, “And he ain’t a small fella.”

Dean clears his throat. “No, thank you.” Out of nervous habit, he adjusts his collar. His brooding had gotten his head out of the game, a dangerous lapse in attention. “I’m just here about Max Miller’s disappearance. His mother filed a missing person’s report about a year ago.”

Officer Stanton, as she’d introduced herself and as her uniform reads, shakes her head. “Missing people are about the least of our problems ‘round here. Let me take a look in the computer.” She walks around to the other side of the desk; it’s large and sturdy-looking, communal space for the whole station.

Dean tries not to give the donut box any more attention, leans with his elbow on a filing cabinet just so that he can get the computer monitor to hide it from his view while he waits for Stanton to pull up the file.

“Hm,” she says. “Not even sure why this reached you guys. Teenager with a history of abuse running away. Hardly seems like FBI material.”

This isn’t the first time that he’s been told that the case he’s on seems too typical to fall into higher jurisdiction and it won’t be the last. Supernatural cases, so obvious to him, practically neon among grey, get overlooked by default. John Winchester called them Ostriches, the men and women in uniform who saw enough to know better but still chose to bury their heads. When Dean was a kid, he didn’t blame them; the weird shit was scary, dangerous. Now that he’s older, he sees that they can’t afford to have defensive denial, not if they want to keep people safe.

“Well, we think it’s tied to another case,” he says vaguely, maneuvering around to her side of the desk so that he can look over her shoulder at the screen.

She snaps at him. “You don’t have to crowd me; I can print the file.”

He takes a step back. “Sorry.” He remains with his back nearly pressed to the wall, as she prints the files, then sets them in a yellow folder. She’s been strangely helpful, offering to print for him and being so handy with the computer and everything. His own computer skills have gotten a lot better (Sam would be pleased) but he still prefers others to do the electronic poking, too much like their dad, focused on the tangible.

“Well, good luck with whatever you think you’re going to figure out,” she says, handing over the folder, words and voice clearly conveying that she’s unconvinced that it's anything other than a waste of time.

“Thanks. Hey, I don’t suppose you could give me directions to…” he rifles through some pages looking for the guy’s address.

“I’ll print that too,” she says with a smile. He doesn’t think it’s fake and he’s glad he didn’t screw up too much. “And you sure you don’t want to take a donut with you for the road?”

“Yeah,” he says with a sigh. “Not a big donut fan these days.”

  
  
  


Two of the seven police reports filed in connection with the Millers recommend CPS intervention. 1994, two drunk men, Max’s father, Jim, and uncle, Roger, get into a fistfight with each other in the backyard at 11 at night. The cops note that Max’s arm is broken. “Got in the way,” Jim Miller says, an accident, just a boy getting between two rowdy family members. The boy is taken to the hospital and the cops make the CPS recommendation. The report contains no follow-up information. The second time, in 1997, one of Max’s teachers calls in red-flag behavior and a black eye. “He doesn’t want to be touched and he always looks nervous,” the teacher notes. An officer visits the Miller home, concurs with the teacher’s observations. Again, nothing follows.

Dean reads over the grim pieces of paper once again, catches names and dates. Dean’s life may not have been easy, but at least he had a dad that gave two shits about him. The few times he’d been in the ER, it was because some _ thing, _ not some _ one _ had put him there. Max just kept slipping through the cracks, even after people cared enough to try and help.

Dean checks out the neighborhood, matches the address on the reports with the house he’s eyeing from the Impala. There’s rust on the trellises that flank the large picture window. An inches-high fence marks the rectangle of dead grass that might once have been a garden. Two chains dangle from the sturdy low branches of a fir tree, remnants of a swing that now look more like a lynching station. The house is shitty in a way that says it used to be someone’s pride and joy but has now switched over to lazier hands. The house next door fares no better. That would be good old Uncle Roger’s place, according to the paperwork. A man that seemed to enjoy his punching bag nephew as much as his brother did.

And now Max Miller is missing. It would be easy to assume that the boy finally ran away, escaping from the violence, but that’s not what the path of information leads Dean to believe. Dean has found a pattern and Max fits into that pattern. Max Miller was born May 2nd, 1983, just like Sam. His mother died in a fire six months to the day later, just like Dean and Sam’s. Just like Scott Carey’s and Ruth Yien’s. Dean thinks he’s found another one of Azazel’s kids. Or, failed to find another one since, like the others, this one is gone. Is it the demon himself snatching these kids up? Maybe harvesting them for whatever messed up scheme he has? Or is it angels? Dispatching the kids before they can grow up to stage a coup against the big beardy sky dude?

The neighbor’s door on which Dean knocks belongs to a man who called in three of the police complaints. Most times, he has to get past a witness’s “I already told you guys what I know” BS before they start to yammer on, happy to have someone to listen to the gossip that they have. Other times, they clam up, unhappy with dredging up bad memories. That’s not Mr. Gowdy’s style, though. He relates the tales of Max’s abuse, like when he was thrown through a glass sliding door (15 stitches from what he’d heard), solemnly but earnestly. He’s hoping that Dean’s there to help. If Dean helps, it’ll be incidental, just a consequence of a perceived connection with Sam or with the angels and demons that have fucked with Sam’s life.

He asks Mr. Gowdy if anyone had taken an interest in Max, maybe a priest, before the disappearance. He omits the part about the priest possibly having yellow eyes and reeking of spoiled eggs. The neighbor laughs bitterly. “A priest? Not for the Millers. Jim didn’t have enough religion if you ask me!”

Hiding his disappointment as best he can, Dean asks more questions; he’ll push this conversation as far as his private investigator persona will allow. “Did Max have any friends that I could talk to?”

They’re protected by the porch overhang, Dean in his private investigator chic and Mr. Gowdy is in a sleeveless shirt, his plump hairy arm pressing against the door frame. “Oh, I didn’t know him that well. I’d think that Alice, at least, would know about his friends.” Alice is this Max’s mom. She seems like a wisp of a woman, just floating nebulously in the backgrounds of the reports, almost like a ghost, there but effecting no change, doing nothing to stop her husband. 

“Moms don’t always know what their kids are up to, you know?” says Dean. “Maybe he was hanging around other kids that she wouldn’t approve of.” 

Gowdy considers this for several long seconds. Finally, he shakes his head. “Saginaw’s got a lot of gangs, but I don’t think he was that kind of kid. His jeans fit and he was by himself most of the time that I could tell.” 

“Yeah, just looking into all possibilities.” It’s an excuse he gives on pretty much every case like this, where he has to get information from witnesses. The neighbor doesn’t seem to be useful for anything but stories of abuse. Still, Dean thanks him, gives him a fake business card and heads back to the Impala.

He very slowly bumps a closed fist on the top of the car. He’s got a feeling about this one, that this Max is one of the special blood children, but he needs to find one of the actual kids, not traces of them after they’ve gone MIA. He can’t check out every instance of mom arson in America. But, he’s got something to go off of now, which is more than he had a year ago. The thing that’s helping Dean is that he knows Sam isn’t going to let Azazel go. Just like the rest of his life, it all comes down to finding the Yellow-Eyed Demon. Find that thing, find Sam. 

He decides to wrap it up for the day. Tomorrow is a school day and he figures maybe he will hit up Max’s school, see if he can’t find someone who knows something. It’s too bad that he can’t really pass as a high-schooler these days, too broad of shoulders, too strong of a build. He wonders, for the millionth time, what Sammy looks like these days. Does he look more like a man instead of a boy? Is his hair still long?

“Miss ya, Sammy,” he whispers into the air, only because he can’t say it to Sam in person.


	4. Chores and Other Minor Responsibilities

Chesapeake, Virginia - April 2001

Traci shivers awake. She’d heard someone speaking to her, she’s sure of it, which would be fine if she’d gone to bed with someone, but it’s been a long dry spell and the only one sharing it lately has four legs and lacks the ability to say anything other than “arf.” The clock reads 3, just as it had last night and the night before. She doesn’t want to get out of bed to flip the light on, but she doesn’t have a bedside lamp, so she makes herself. Dotty blinks up at her, nub tail wiggling beneath the blanket. Traci doesn’t see anything amiss in the room. 

“Did you hear anything?” she asks the dog. The dog yawns a smile at her but offers no insight. She’s on her favorite blanket, the little fleece snowman throw that Traci had bought two Valentine’s Days ago when non-romantic holiday items were practically being given away. Not that Dotty has a care in the world normally, but she seems to have even less when she’s curled up with her blanket pulled up around her booty.

Traci’s afraid, but she looks around the rest of the apartment. She likes to think that she’s immune to many of the superstitions that other wannabe LA starlets adorn themselves with. She doesn’t drink lemon water in the morning to balance her pH, she straight out says Macbeth (not that she’ll ever be the type that’s cast in a Shakespeare play with her big tits and deep voice), and she never once paid a fake gypsy to deal out some cards that would tell her when her big break would be. She didn’t even wear lucky underwear on auditions; her opinion of a panty’s luck was in how well it tended to be received by those that got the chance to view it.

She’s been at this new place a month. It’s got more personality than the dull starter apartment she’d rented last year. This one is a duplex townhome. She’d lost her mind when she’d seen the two stories. By Cali terms, living here alone was practically owning a mansion and she’d thrilled at being able to so neatly separate her sleeping area from her doing-anything-else area. She likes the idea of everything having its place rather than the ‘what can I cram in here?’ way she’s been living the last couple decades. The drawback seems to be that it’s hellsa scary looking into the blackness of the downstairs after you’ve heard someone whispering shit in your ear the third night in a row. 

Once she’s downstairs, she flicks on the light; though there’s a switch at the top and bottom, only the bottom one works. The living room looks as it did when she’d gone to bed: marijuana pipe next to the TV remote, bowl of nuts covered by a hardback book so that Dotty wouldn’t get into it, and throw pillows and comforter pushed down to the bottom of the couch. Her search of the kitchen and the laundry room goes much the same way. She sees only a lived-in place, but no sign that anyone has entered; same as the last two nights.

Spooky. Even if it was a warm night, she would have the chills. 

Before heading back to bed, she makes a pit stop in the bathroom. She pushes her toes onto the weight scale while she pees, seeing how many pounds she can add just by toe strength alone. The answer is not much. Sometimes the toilet keeps flushing and she’ll need to jiggle the handle. There’s always a sort of extra bubble sound to it when it does, so she waits a moment after flushing to listen for the telltale sign. 

Movement catches her eye and she looks up straight into the bathroom mirror. There behind her is a young girl drenched with water, mouth hanging open, watching her. She gasps. The sound of it lasts longer than the image had. When she whirls around, ready to fight or fly, there’s no one behind her. She turns back to the mirror but now there’s nothing. She calls out, “Dotty!”

The dog appears, alert because she’s not used to being summoned in the middle of the night. Together, they do a thorough search again of the house, this time with Traci’s phone in her hand. She dials the number that’s been scrawled on the dry erase board on her fridge as they look.

It goes to voicemail which makes her swear. Yeah, he’s sleeping, but couldn’t he just know, sense with his fucking psychic powers that something is wrong? After the beep, she rambles. “Sam, I saw a ghost. I think. There’s a fucking ghost in my apartment. Are those real? Jesus, I sound fucking crazy! But it was in my mirror and Sam, I’m scared. You know I don’t freak out easy, right? Well, something’s up with my place. You have to call me. You have to bust this one. It was like right behind me! I’ve got huge goosebumps right now, dude. Call me. Save me. Okay? Oh, it’s Traci.”

She stays awake the rest of the night, fills it with walking Dotty, watching TV, and waiting for Sam to return her call. 

  
  


Sam finds the dead girl’s necklace in Traci’s shower drain. The tip-off had been both the ghost’s location and her wet state. Even finding her remains is easy enough since she’s right where she should be in Chesapeake Memorial Gardens. The hardest part is the actual digging up of the coffin so that he can drape the necklace over the rotting chest of the body. He hears her whisper in his ear as he does and though he can’t make out the words, it sounds grateful, and then all is quiet again. He wishes all hunts were this easy. If they were, maybe he wouldn’t have dreaded them as much as he did. 

He could head back immediately to camp, but there’s the matter of replacing the plumbing he’d had to remove. His hands are coated in soap scum slime as he puts everything back the way he’d found it. 

“You didn’t tell me that hunters had to be plumbers too,” says Traci smartly. She has no compunctions about making him do all the elbow work, though he’s pretty sure she could figure all this out on her own. 

He rolls his eyes. Hunters wear a lot of hats, it’s true. It seems like no matter what area of expertise, there’s always something more that he needs to learn or needs to already have known. Well, he’s not a hunter anymore, not really. His days of helping out damsels are done, with, he’s finding, the occasional exception. He tightens the shower drain strainer and runs the water a bit to wash away the smear of dirt and old soap, splashing his hands in the stream as he does so. When he rises up from his knees, she’s smiling at him proudly. The look reminds him of how Chal would look at him sometimes and it hurts. “All done,” he says.

“And it won’t be back?”

“She got what was keeping her. It’s not uncommon for a ghost to become obsessed with an object. They fixate and it stops them from being all the way dead.”

“So you’re saying that my Louboutins can make me immortal?”

He’d forgotten how often she jokes. The camp kids are so much more serious and he’s been so preoccupied with his own vengeance that he certainly doesn’t try to lighten moods. It’s good that they’re serious because the battle they’re preparing for could very well leave none of them alive. If they were like Traci, he’d doubt their devotion and their dependability to what needs to be accomplished. 

He washes his hands again in the sink with Traci standing right next to him, watching him.

“You look different.”

“How so?” he asks.

“You look pissed. Are you pissed at me?” 

He has to reach past her to wipe his hands on one of her towels, hopefully not the one that she dries with after the shower, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He doesn’t know where she keeps her clean towels in this new place. It’s strange, in a way, that he doesn’t feel more awkward in this home; having shared a roof for a few months bonded them more than he would have thought. “No, I’m not pissed at you.”

“Cause I made you drive a thousand miles to find a dead chick’s jewelry in my drain?” 

She looks lovely today, even with the bloodshot eyes. She’s dyed her already brunette hair to black and it makes the green of the irises pop. It gives her an air of mystery like she’s a fortune teller that became obsessed with lifting weights. 

He smiles. “It’s not a thousand miles and it’s fine. There wasn’t even that much to do.” He looks around at her apartment. She’s only recently moved in but it looks homey already. She’s good at putting little Traci touches on things: the batik fabrics over lampshades, collages on the wall of her best headshots (who else would have framed pictures of just themselves?), and stained-glass sun catchers that make rainbows around the room when the sun hits right. He sits down on the couch and Dotty runs over to climb into his lap, tongue lolling out. 

Traci judges her dog’s disloyalty from her place in front of the TV. “That bitch doesn’t know who feeds her.”

Sam can’t disagree. All it would take was a few belly scratches, and Dotty would be more than happy to claim any new hand as an owner. 

He looks at the little box of coasters on the table in front of him. He’s set plastic cups on them many times. They’re purple hexagons with little yellow flowers. He misses the niceties of having a roof over his head. This second camp is much like the old one with no electricity and no running water. They store huge jugs of fresh water up from the city and charge up everyone’s phones at the library regularly. They’re as disconnected as Sam could convince them to be. It’s easier to do so now that they’re hunting. It makes them feel useful like they’re not just part of some cult. He never thought that a couch would feel like a luxury and he knows most of the other Azzy kids would be insanely jealous if they knew he was sitting on one now.

When Traci sits on the other end of the couch, he asks her what he’s wanted to ask for a while. “You believe me now?”

“Just cause there’s ghosts doesn’t mean that there’s deeeee-mons.” Her voice doesn’t sound convincing, and when he looks to her neither do her eyes. “Okay, so you obviously know about some of these things. It was totally scary, though, seeing that thing behind me.” She shivers dramatically. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep again.”

“That was pretty...benign,” he says, nails digging into that spongy spot on Dotty’s chest that makes her leg start kicking like crazy. “She couldn’t have hurt you.”

“Take me to the camp. Just for a day or two. I can’t… I can’t be alone after that, Sam. Besides, you keep saying soon you’ll let me visit.”

Sam frowns. He knows that she keeps asking, but he wants to keep her as far away from that stuff, hell, as far away from him, as possible. There’s something rotten in all of them. Sam sees it, this commonality of taint, but he needs them. He’s probably the worst of the lot. “We’re training, Trace.”

“You’ve  _ been _ training, and you’re going to be training. I won’t be in the way. Stop trying to keep your distance from me, you stupid punk kid.”

Sam sighs. He isn’t just acting being put out by her request, he genuinely is. They practice shooting with firearms, etching sigils, reciting banishment spells, and moving objects and controlling thoughts with their minds. He doesn’t want Traci around that. She’s just a vivacious starlet whose big worries are finding love and keeping her neons from fading. He doesn’t want to bring so much heaviness into her life. He knows that he let a bit of it in that day on the highway in Las Vegas and even that leaves him feeling guilty. 

“I’ve got a sleeping bag,” she says.

“That’s not....”

“I don’t care!” She shimmies up beside him and throws her arms around Sam in a desperate begging motion. Dotty does doggy sit-ups so that she can best lick at her owner’s face and arms. “Ack! Dotty! Sam, don’t just leave me here in this haunted…”

“Formerly haunted…” he interjects.

“Formerly haunted luxury townhome.”

“Don’t you have work?” Sam asks. He has a hard time saying no to her when she actually touches him. He’s so touch-starved at this point that her hands feel like defibrillator paddles jolting currents of pleasant contact through him. 

“You’re caving,” she says, her lovely face inches from his own. 

He groans. “That’s because you are impossible to dissuade.”

Her hand musses up his hair. Dotty wiggles out of his lap, apparently unhappy to no longer be the center of attention as he tries to fix it. “Thanks, doll.” 

“Yeah… Well, there’s going to be rules.”  
With a wink, she retorts, “With you, there’s always rules.” 

* * *

Azzy Camp 2: Electric Boogaloo - West of Portland, Maine - April 2001

Max has been jealous of the enigmatic Traci figure in Sam’s life for a while now. She’s a nebulous concept, described by Sam as “a woman I stayed with after I found out who I was.” When Sam gets off phone calls with her, he is visibly less burdened, more likely then to make jokes than any other time. Max should be glad that he’s got any form of escape since he worries constantly that Sam’s going to snap, but it bothers him to no end that none of the Azzy kids can have that effect, that specifically, he can’t have that effect. In Max’s head, she’s been lots of things - femme fatale, Sam genderswap, badass hunter, little old lady - all depending on his interactions with Sam and the optimism or pessimism associated with them. He hadn’t expected to actually meet her, hadn’t expected it to be her long legs and shoulder-length hair emerging from the Ford truck that serves as the gang’s primary source of transportation. He grinds to a halt so fast upon spotting this unexpected vision that it kicks up dust around his feet like a roadrunner cartoon. Instantly his hands feel clammy and his heart catches in his throat. Sam’s brought home a girl.

She stretches tall, undoing long-ride compactness, and she inhales deeply of the fresh forest scent. Max notes the bounce of her breasts as she lands back from her tiptoes and feels one of his nearly perpetual headaches bump beneath his forehead. When she sees Max, a wide grin, unguarded and genuine, spreads across her face. “Hi! Which one are you?” She closes the 30- foot distance between them in no time and she hurls her arms around him. “I bet you’re Max!” she exclaims. He can feel her chest move with her words. He hadn’t consented to a hug and he keeps his arms around wide, palms facing forward, clearly indicating his unwillingness as a participant. “Are you?” she asks, finally letting go and looking at his face.

“You’re Traci,” he says deadpan. “Sam brought you back with him.”

She winks. “I made him. I’ll have to teach you how to get him to agree to stuff; it’s pretty easy, really.”

“Trace…” warns Sam. He’s got a carry-on size suitcase in one of his hands. Despite the gruff tone, his mood is light, just like when he talks to her on the phone. 

“I don’t have any suggestions for how to get that stick out of his ass, though.” She scrunches her nose and sticks out her tongue at Sam. “I’m all ears if you know that trick.”

By then, Colly and Scott have arrived and Traci turns her attention (and arms) to them. “Hi, guys! I’m Traci! I’m sure Sam has told you all about me!”

While they exchange greetings, Max and Sam exchange thoughts. They’re still learning how to do this, but it works smoother between them than any of the other Azzy kids. It’s less like words most of the time, just feelings, like if cavemen were trying to convey things mentally. They both are certain that this will one day be finely honed, as clear as speaking, but for now, it’s what they have. The conversation goes roughly like this:

*confused* 

*relaxed*

*wary*

*calm, amused*

*wary*

“She’s okay,” Sam says. “She’s not one of us, but she can be trusted.” Then with un-Samlike humor, he adds, “Just don’t give her a gun.”

Then, Sam is setting Traci up in his lean-to. They don’t have a spare. Sam’s the only one on his own; Max, Colly, and Scott all share the big barracks-style one they have set up. Considering his family life, Max should probably not trust the others while he’s sleeping, but he finds the sounds of their snores and shuffles soothing. He hates isolation more than he distrusts people.

“She’s… perky,” observes Colly. It sounds judgmental coming from her and maybe it is, because she’s got her arms crossed while she watches them disappear from sight.

“Every part of her,” Scott says with a laugh. The comment earns him a slap on the arm from Colly. 

“I mean, she doesn’t seem like someone that Comandante Grouch Ass would be into,” she explains.

“Doubt our fearless leader is into her. He’s got revenge on his mind, not romance.”

Max isn’t much for gossip, but he’d better get more inquisitive because he needs to know who this Traci is and in just what capacity Sam Winchester sees her. 

Getting personal details about Traci ends up not being a problem so much as trying to stop her from giving them, and by Traci’s third day at Camp Boogaloo, Max finds that, much like the other kids, the beautiful woman sleeping in Sam’s cabin has grown on him. She’s obnoxious but in an unabashed way. He’s still surprised that Sam had resisted strangling her in the six-month period that they’d shared an apartment. She would definitely try his own patience if she continued to stay, but she’s mentioned several times about needing to get back to work, so that doesn’t seem like a concern.

They’re washing clothes in the stream, one of everyone’s least favorite chores and one that seems to have persisted from the first camp even though they are less than an hour from a laundromat now. Traci had shucked off her pants before stepping into the stream, her legs like those of a crane standing shin-deep in the cold-as-shit water. Max watches her in amazement. 

“Aren’t you from California?” 

She sets the bucket of dirty laundry on what looks to be a stable arrangement of stones. It holds and she begins to pluck the clothes out, one hand already holding the soap. “The ocean’s cold in Cali too, dipshit. It’s just there’s more sun to heat you up after you swim.”

Max’s hands always feel like ice when he does laundry duty, but then his circulation has always been a bit shoddy. Despite his rosy cheeks, his hands and feet are usually on the chilly side, especially on colder days like today.

“So, you’ve heard my life story, what’s yours?” she asks loudly. For once, it’s necessary so that she can be heard over the water; there’s no excuse for her volume when they’re sitting around the campfire.

“Uh, standard, I guess.”

“Standard for cursed children,” she points out. 

“Yeah.”

“Come on, I can tell you’ve got a tragic backstory. You’re totally the type of character I’d wanna play if I was a dude.”

Max is not even sure what to make of that. “No one would want to play me.”

“Sure, you’re like super deep and stuff! All the real tearjerker moments come from when deep people have feelings.”

Knowing she won’t get offended, he asks, “What are you talking about?” with all the bewilderment that he feels. 

She shrugs. “You look at people different, not like, me and Sam do. We look at how people can be useful to us. You look at people like you’re an alien that has to, like, figure out how each person works for like some big report you’re writing up for the mothership.”

“Thanks,” he says sarcastically, thinking perhaps he didn’t like her as much as he did five minutes earlier.

“Whatever,” she says. “Why’d you leave home to join Sam’s group?”

He truly feels like this is more Sam and his group like they are co-founders, and he has sensed through their connection that Sam feels similarly. Max is more of a silent partner. “To fight Azazel.”  
“Wasn’t it hard to leave home? You’re only 17.”

“No, it wasn’t hard. I wanted out anyway.”

She nods. Her hair is pulled up into a messy bun behind her and she’s wearing sunglasses, but no matter how obscure the glass, he’s pretty sure he knows the look that he’s being given. Tragic backstory.

“Lots of people have shitty parents,” he says defensively. It was something he’d reminded himself endless amounts of times. When he’d be feeling like putting a rope around his neck or a bullet in his head, he’d think about how he was just one in this huge percentage of abuse victims. He’d been lucky to only get broken bones, but it didn’t feel like that, even if his head says it’s true. All those kids out there holding out for those good moments, the little interludes of affection in between the surges of anger.

“Totally. Too many,” Traci agrees. “Still, probably made it easier to leave with Sam being a major cutie, huh?”

Facial blood flow, Max’s archnemesis, introduces itself. He thinks of several rebuttals to that, something about how stopping a demon was more important or to turn around and ask her why she thinks a 17-year-old is cute, but his mind will never be as fast as Traci’s mouth. 

“Well, you’ll have to take your time with that boy. His first love really, really damaged him. He’s still hurting from that. Eventually, he’ll be able to have a relationship again, but I think it’s gonna be a while.” His heart speeds up. This is not gossip that he should be getting out of her, not anything she should be telling, but was Sam ever going to trust him enough to come out with this on his own. He should stop her, but he doesn’t. “He’s all stone now but it’s only because he’s so loving, and it cost him a lot to be that way. He’s trying to protect himself. You know, like a turtle. Just, don’t expect it to be fast. You might be able to get into his heart eventually.”

Max really likes her again. He doesn’t say anything, because he’d either have to confess or lie. She changes the conversation, though, and, man, can she just chatter. She talks all the way through washing the clothes and hanging them up to dry. He listens, as he tends to, adding only things only when she pauses for longer than a breath. He’ll be happy to see her go, but he’s really happy she came.

* * *

Fort Wayne, Indiana - July 2001

She’s as different from Sam as he can find. She’s Asian, petite, with short

hair as dark as tar. The only fireworks are the ones booming outside of her apartment. He doesn’t even get her there, let alone himself. When she politely kicks him out, he deserves it. He sees Sam’s disappointed eyes every time he closes his own. 

‘It’s not cheating!’ he tells the figment over and over again. ‘You ran. You left me.’ He doesn’t owe Sam anything, not anymore. Sam had said boyfriend first. Sam had been the one who refused to sleep with someone else. Sam had said ‘love’ first. He’d started it all. It’s all Sam’s fault. Everything is. 

It’s been so long now. He’d just wanted to touch someone else again. He just didn’t want to be alone anymore. He’d just wanted to move on. It’s time to move on. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He’s just chasing a different demon. He sets the Impala southwest. He wants the kindness of a ham and cheese melt.

* * *

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - July 2001

Dean’s nervous when he pulls into the Sanctuary Bar. He’d never turned up that night, and the lady’s got a right to be pissed about that, but he doesn’t know Willa well enough to be able to guess how pissed. It’s night but the parking lot is well lit, for a dive bar, it’s illuminated like a sports stadium because Hunters need more visibility than the shit they hunt. He avoids a small smattering of broken glass and pulls back the heavy metal door to the building. 

Sports commentary, relaxed conversation, country music, and beer bottle clacks mingle into a single soundtrack of bar. Dean knows this music, feels its tempo in his veins. It’s soothing to his apprehension until he spots her, red curly hair in a side ponytail, body angled over the bar chatting with two patrons sitting side by side. He sidles over, and she watches him approach.

He braces himself. 

“Hey there, Dean. Another Old Milwaukee?” she asks, eyes sparkling mischievously. 

Damn, that girl is good. He assumes she’s right, has to, because damned if he remembers what he’d ordered last year. “Dealer’s choice. I’m here for the company,” he says, referring back to their first conversation. 

She looks exactly the same, earrings, outfit, makeup-free face, and she doesn’t seem mad. She considers his words. “I’ll get you a pale ale from a local brewery, and let you know that we close down in about an hour.”

He’s humbled by her forgiveness, gives her a nod of acknowledgment, and takes a seat beside the wife and husband she’d been talking to before.

Over the next hour, he chats up Mae and Donny, and then, when they leave, he throws darts, slowly working through only his second bottle (he wants sobriety for tonight) with the other hand. Eventually, a guy who says his name is Phineas rambles on about fishing for what the clock says is 18 minutes, but what has to be at least a year and a half. It’s long enough, though, takes him to the ringing of the closing time bell (it’s labeled and everything). Other than lures and bait, it’s about the best kind of evening that Dean can have without a lay or a death involved.

When she locks the door behind the last patron, Willa laughs. She walks back to Dean and tosses the disgusting hand towel on her shoulder at his head. It falls short, landing on his knee. “Well, you charmed Phineas, that’s for sure.”

“Is that really his name?” he asks, moving the rag to the bartop. 

She doesn’t bother answering. She fiddles with the strings on her apron, freeing her curves from the stiff stained fabric, and studies him. “So, what brought you back?” 

Dean’s tempted to toss out something cheesy, but Sam had chiseled something into him, and he doesn’t want to be that guy anymore, doesn’t want to wear his shallowness like a raincoat protecting him from feelings. He can’t be truly honest, can’t say, ‘Your dad took care of me once here, and I feel safer here.’ “I had a good feeling about you,” he says. 

“That’s a line,” she says dismissively. “You don’t know me from Adam.”

He shakes his head. Even trying to not come off like a cheesy pickup artist, he had. “No, really. You’re right. I don’t know you at all. But you seem like good people, and I have a shortage of good people in my life right now.”

She moves closer to him, searching within his eyes for an itemized list of his personality traits and his motivations. “Quick lay or girl when you come into port?” she asks. 

God, he respects how straight-forward she is. If everyone acted like this, the world would be a lot easier to navigate. He brushes his palm on his jeans, suddenly aware that he’s sweating. Vulnerability has never been his strong suit. “Is friend an option?”

Willa laughs again, and he swears he can hear the twang of her accent in just that. “Probably not. You’re kinda my type. I might try and get you to put out. I can’t imagine it’d make for a good friendship, me always pestering you for a dickin’.”

“You’ll be that guy who can’t take no for an answer.”

“I don’t know if you failed to notice the tits, but I’ll be that  _ gal _ who can’t take no for an answer.”

Dean grins. “Oh, those weren’t lost on me...believe me. Or the rest.”

He walks around with her as she wraps things up for the night. Miguel, the cook who’d been super interested in Baby the last time he’d been in, scrubs off grease from the grill top with a mesh wire brush. He greets Dean as though they’re long lost friends, asking about how things have been going with a kind of curiosity that Dean can’t fake when interrogating vics. The other gal who works there, Isabella, doesn’t give a rat’s ass that Dean’s being given some behind-the-scenes tour, and bolts as soon as she gets the go-ahead from her boss. 

“I really like your bar,” he says to Willa once they’re back at her house, Dean having followed her Jeep the short two-mile commute. 

She’s fishing out the keys, attached taser bogging the chain down, but probably making it easier to find in her satchel. “It’s still weird to think of it as my bar. I mean, it’s still Daddy’s to me.” 

She pushes the door open and flicks on the light. “Anubis! Oreo!” she calls out. There’s the sound of a dog door, the creak of mechanism and the wump of heavy plastic, and then many excited paws on tile, then carpet. It’s like waiting for a stampede. He’s hardly surprised by the Doberman, but the little mop dog that trails behind the taller one’s ankles actually makes him laugh. They jump on him with excited sniffs and tongues. 

“Anubis, get down! You know you’re too big for that!” Willa scolds. With the dog’s name freshly spoken, it sets upon his owner with the same happy welcoming it had the stranger. She pets the Doberman, smacking its rump to a beat, and leaning farther to give the small one, Oreo, some attention to.

“Now, I know this one is a dog,” Dean says, pointing to Anubis, “But this one… floor cleaner?”

“Oreo? Nah, Oreo’s a footwarmer.” She plucks Oreo from the floor and it strains in her arms, aiming to lick every sweatdrop she’s shed throughout the day off her chin. “Great in the winter. And Anubis is a dishwasher.” It’s stubbed tail wags happily. “He wasn’t even a year old when he discovered he could reach the dish if it’s riiiight on the edge of the kitchen counter.” 

There’s no hallway, the front door leading into a family room with a grey stone fireplace, and two lazy boy recliners facing a television set. There’s a gun rack on the wall next to the door with slots for five guns. At present, there are only three. Above it, a plaque reads: “This house is protected by the Good Lord and a gun. You might meet them both if you come in unwelcome.” It’d probably make more sense to have the plaque  _ outside _ the house, but what does Dean know about decorating a home?

He follows her into the dining room, which is straight ahead past the family room, and the table there is piled up with tools and weapons. 

“Daddy never had a real workshop, just the dining room table. We ate in front of the TV.” She seems embarrassed but he’s a hunter and he gets it. “You want something to drink?”

“Sure,” he says, pulling up a seat at the table, much to Anubis’s delight. He tries to pet the dog, but its tongue gets in the way, attacking his hand whenever it can get anywhere close to the beast’s fur. When Willa arrives with two bottled waters, she’s finally set down the other dog. She maneuvers one of the chairs directly in front of him, about a foot apart, and sets her feet high on the table, unconcerned with their proximity to wooden stakes, silver bullets, and chemicals in plastic baggies. 

“Do you have vamps around here?” he asks.

“Huh? Oh, the stakes. We did. Like I said, this place is lousy with the supernatural. The vamps were a long, long time ago though. Surprised Daddy still had them out, to be honest. Gosh, I think I must’ve been 13 when he and his buddies cleared out that nest. We lost Frankie that time.” Her sweet perfectly angled face becomes serious. “He was only 40, and his sister Anna was mighty angry at all of us for years… well, she’s still probably angry, us getting him involved in that.”

“If hunters hadn’t gotten involved, a lot more people would’ve had angry sisters,” says Dean. He’s probably not telling her anything she doesn’t know, but he wants to assuage her anyway. 

Willa sighs. “I know. I think we’ve got it lucky here. We’re able to be a lot more open about what goes on than most places. Almost everyone here has seen somethin’. I think about trying to keep the forces of evil at bay and do it as a secret… man, now that would be tough.” 

“You have to lie a lot,” Dean admits. He doesn’t mention the credit card fraud and hustling. He likes to think that if people knew why he did those things, maybe they’d give him a free pass. Probably not, though. 

“So my new friend is a good liar?” asks Willa. 

“I’ll never tell.” He turns the cap on his water bottle and it crackles as the plastic splits. The dogs stare at him hopefully, like he’s got a 16 oz. bottle of kibble. He’s never been particularly fond of animals. They’re okay, but they’re dumb and he doesn’t really trust them. Hell, he feels the same way about people most times, but at least they can sometimes be reasoned with.

They both take simultaneous swigs of water, each feeling a little awkward. “So, how long have you lived here?” he finally asks. 

“My whole life. My folks got this place as a wedding present.”

He raises his eyebrows. “That’s quite a present.”

“Yeah, well, neither of ‘em grew up what anyone would consider poor. My granddaddy on my daddy’s side owned quite a few properties, so it was easy for him to just get rid of one. I think he wrote it off on his taxes or something. Anyway, the market was different then.” She runs one of her short nails around the grooves in the bottle, piercing the paper label in even tracks. “Where do you live?”

“The Impala,” he says with noteworthy honesty. When she looks at him questioningly, he just grins and nods. “Same place I grew up,” he adds. He knows, from a periphery sort of way, that it’s a weird thing to say, a red flag that should result in his immediate eviction from the premises, but she’s been straightforward with him, and he wants to be with her. 

Willa thinks about a proper response. For some reason she lands on, “Not a very roomy backseat.” 

Eventually, they move into the family room, basking in the reclining goodness of the Lazy Boys, her with Oreo on her midsection. They talk until the sun begins to crack through the splits in the curtains. It’s not all serious talk, but some of it is. She tells him about how she hasn’t tossed out anything of her dad’s yet. He tells her about trying to find his runaway little brother before the demons do. He offers to help her go through the dead man’s things. She offers to put out the word that Sam’s missing. 

She stretches. “Well, I’m zonkered. I’ve got a guest room if you wanna sleep there. The sheets haven’t been changed in a while, but it’s bigger than a backseat.”

“I might take you up on that.”  
“Unless,” she says, lowering the neckline of her top on one side, “You wanna share my bed.” She waggles her eyebrows comically.

He thinks of hotel room beds, two, one with weapons and drying sex juices, one with him and Sam, holding each other in post-coital bliss. The echoes of Dean’s desperate cries, ‘I’m all yours!,’ bouncing off old-lady-dress wallpaper. He’d belonged to someone for one minute in time, one breath. 

“I’ll take the spare, if that’s okay.”

“Can’t blame a gal for trying,” she says. Then, with a laugh. “Honestly, I’d have been in a real pickle if you’d wanted to fuck me, cause I am  _ tired, _ ” she says, stretching each vowel in the word. “I’d have been barely better than a blow-up sex doll.”

Yeah, Willa’s good people. 

* * *

Lawrence, Kansas - August 2001

The talk finally turns to Sam after the sun goes down and Chal turns on the three lamps in the small living room, making him feel like he’s in a grocery store or maybe a detention room. He’s got a belly full of vegetarian lasagna and Dr. Pepper. Cujo, who weighs more than him now and looks more like something out of a Grimm fairy tale than a house pet, is gnawing on a sturdy looking dog toy on the floor next to Chal. Dean takes too long between visits, but eventually the waheela had remembered his scent; this doesn’t mean that she’s 100% trusting his presence, and she hasn’t been more than a foot away from her master since they’d let her out of her cage following meals (she no longer obeys when food is around and gets combative when Chal eats).

“I’ve kept Sam a room here.”

The two years hang over their heads like a guillotine. The tragic anniversary of Sam’s departure, the startling revelation of their interconnectedness, and the severing of ties between Chal and John. The air reeks with their loss and their failure.

“That’s a good idea,” he says, though he isn’t sure it is. “You still banking on him visiting here?”

She’s got her knees pulled up to her chest, hands wrapped around her ankles. It’s hot as hell inside the house - no air conditioning, and so she’s in shorts and a sports bra, her short hair in messy half-pigtails. Two years ago he’d have been seeing that in a different way, eyeing her curves lecherously. Now, though, that’s Chal, and all he’s thinking about her exposed skin is how dark she is and how he can see the glaze of sweat behind her knees and on her forehead near the hairline. 

“I think that he has chosen to put the past behind him,” she says. They go back and forth about this. Chal thinks Sam’s a college student somewhere, blending in perfectly with the normies; Dean thinks he’s building an army. Regardless, she’s still here in Lawrence monitoring the old house, and he’s still working his way through recent student ID records (with a lot of technical help from a nerdy fellow hunter) at all the colleges in America with art programs. 

“You still putting in your angel calls?” he asks.

“I perform the ritual every full moon, entreating the angels for their assistance.” 

“And so far not a peep,” he guesses.

“They’re afraid. I can’t fault them for that. Well, I shouldn’t fault them for that. I get angry, call them cowards, but the repercussions of aiding me could be severe.” She looks down into her knees. “No angel should experience falling.” 

“And you think they could get kicked out for helping Sam?” He realizes what a stupid question it is when she looks at him. Unlike anyone else would, she doesn’t give him a “Well, duh” look which is what is warranted, but a big-eyed sad look, like she’s experiencing everything again. The repetition in his own mind of the good times is what’s plaguing him; he supposes it could be worse. 

They’re quiet for a time, digesting and pondering. The only sounds are the soft wet noises of Cujo trying to destroy her toy and children riding bikes in the street. “Would it help if I started doing the angel rituals too?”

“I’ll write down the directions for you,” she says, not really answering. 

“Cool.” 

“How many current prospective children do you have?” asks Chal. In any other household in America, that would have a very different meaning. 

“Down to one,” he says. “I’m keeping an eye on that Garner girl, but I don’t think she’s got any demon blood inside her.” They’re flying blind that way, working on intuition. They need some sort of test, and that’s something that Chal’s been trying to find spells for, but in the meantime, he’s still searching. “She hadn’t seen Yellow Eyes or Sam. She...uh, wasn’t very bright.” 

“She just needs to be powerful for his purpose,” reminds Chal.

“I don’t even know what we’re doing. Sometimes I get, like, this gut feeling that Sam’s involved, but that’s it.” It’s all guesswork long-shots. What would he have done if the Garner girl had said, “Yeah, Sam asked me to come away with him four months ago?” She wouldn’t know where Sam was now, couldn’t lead them to him. This is all a stupid distraction to make Dean feel like he’s doing something useful, but what else is he going to do? He’s not the kind to give up. No, his best chance with all this would be word getting back to Sam that a guy who looks like Dean was nosing around asking about him. Then Sam will know that they’re still looking, that they haven’t given up, that he should come home because he still has Dean and Chal caring about him. He doesn’t think it likely that one will say, “Oh yeah, I know where Sam is… let me take you to him.” 

He’s got what he wants to say to Sam already picked out in his head when they do find him.

“Did Sam ever run away as a little kid?” he asks. For Dean to rebel that way, he would have had to have held still, refused to leave a hotel. 

Chal seems offended by the idea, probably unaware that lots of kids do that.“No, of course not.”

“What did he think about you having been an angel?”

It dawns on her then, that he isn’t blaming her as a parent, that he’s just trying to talk about Sam. She loosens her legs, lets them fall to the side. “I think it scared him when I lost my grace. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to care for us both without it, and he felt my fear.” Dean’s never been particularly good at anything but hunting and making people come, but he thinks that if he had superpowers like Chal had or like Sam has, that it would be just about the worst thing ever to lose them. A person would have to just be normal, and the world would seem as dangerous as it really is to them for the first time. “But, my being an angel was all he ever knew. He did want me to be his mother, and would become very angry with me for not letting him call me that.”

“You never let him call you mother?”

“No, no. That was Mary. Female angels can’t bear children.”

“Yeah, but you raised him. There’s more to being a mother than just that squeezing out a kid part,” he says, aware that he’s talking out of his ass. He’d been raised amid the ashes of his mother. 

She shakes her head, adamant. “No, it would be disrespectful.” 

Dean doesn’t get it but then he doesn’t get a lot of her eccentricities. 

More time passes in silence. Then, while he’s taking a drink (because isn’t that always the way?), she asks him, “What was your first date like?” 

He coughs, water down the wrong pipe, and attempts to recover. “What?”

“Your first date with Sam. Did he pay for dinner, or did you?”

Oh god. His memory conjures up images he really doesn’t want to have in front of Chal of that first blow job, his tongue on Sam’s foot, asking Sam for permission for more, asking for Sam to identify all the tattoos he found, Sam crying out his name. He banishes these in the time it takes to hack up the water from his windpipe. “You can’t just… Chal, are you really totally okay with that whole thing?”

“Whole thing?” she asks, not understanding.

He swipes his hand down his face. “Yeah, you know, the whole brother thing. Humans don’t… it’s not an okay thing for most people.”

Unexpectedly, she smiles. “God only made two humans. You’re all products of incest. It’s according to God’s plan, so nothing to be ashamed of.”

It’s more coherent an explanation than he tends to get from her, and it makes a kind of sense, even if it's lacking any kind of nuance. Whatever. He’s happy she’s not shooting him in the head for fucking her underage adopted son, but he’ll be happier when the conversation is over. “We didn’t go on a date. Okay?” 

“That’s unfortunate. He was so excited for my first date with your father.”

It’s a good memory, that night, and how nervous Sam was for her. It surprises him to realize that it was the same night. He doesn’t offer that up to Chal. “Yeah, he was.” He’s almost afraid to be quiet, thinking that she’ll ask more inappropriate questions, but he doesn’t really have a follow-up. Until it finally occurs to him to add, “I took him to a bar,” and then some of the stories come pouring out of him, the PG-13 ones, ones that he’s never told anyone about. 

He doesn’t want to think of their sharing of Sam stories as grieving, because he doesn’t want to lose hope completely, but it’s soothing. It makes Sam something tangible, creates a manifestation of him in the room. So, they continue until the time that he lies beneath the covers of the bed intended for Chal’s prodigal son. 


	5. Suprise Supernatural Visits

Azzy Camp 2: Electric Boogaloo - West of Portland, Maine - January 2002

“If we hit the single digits, I’m going back to Little Rock.” All that’s visible of Colly from the mound of blankets forming her winter shell are her eyes, and they’re squinted in a glare. It’s overdramatic. Inside the sizable (normally 4-person) barracks it’s not too bad temperature-wise, not with all seven of them crammed in. 

“Well, the mercury’s only a few off from that now,” responds Jake. He’s sturdy, less apt to complain. He’s stitching a tear in one of his shirts with a hotel needle kit. “So, you’d better start sticking your thumb out.”

“Celebrate the New Year with a frostbitten dick!” jokes Scott. His light blue gloves have black fingertips from book ink, but for once, he’s not reading. He’s curled up on his side, his socked feet in Max’s lap. 

Sam is getting really tired of the complaints. They’ve got two barracks now, three if you count the sad single shed that counts as Sam’s (he does this mostly to differentiate himself as the leader), but everyone is crammed into this one, circling the functional space heater. The deceased one sits in the other barracks, shunned for its performance failure. He’s been waiting for a snow reprieve to head down to town to replace it, but it doesn’t look to be coming anytime soon. It will probably be one of, if not the, coldest night of the year. Sam had bought an almanac when they moved up here, so they knew roughly what to expect. The guide hadn’t let them down, either. Though he’d underestimated the impact of endless days of falling white. Morale was low even before the heater died. 

He can barely remember what life was like two years ago when he was staying with Traci, cozy and warm with a spotted dog looking up from his knee with adoration. They’ve worked hard and made progress over the last couple of years. If he didn’t feel like he was babysitting more often than training them, he’d be fucking proud. They are seven in number. It may be the world’s tiniest army, but he aims to make them the best. 

A smoky smell drifts around the room and just about the time he smells it, it’s followed by at least three of the Kids making exclamations of displeasure. “Oh god, Andy, smoke that outside!” yells Colly.

Andy, who had come up to the camp last week had done so with a bag of weed that was quickly emptying. Sam hadn’t foreseen the evil twin brother in Andy’s life, but he’s grateful for it, happy to add the powers of hypnotic suggestion to their arsenal. Hell, he’s looking forward to learning it for himself as he has been the other kids’ talents, though he’ll need to be particularly careful in his usage; brother Ansem was a gold standard example of misuse of psychic power, and terrifying enough to scare Andy into their fold.

Rather than argue back, Andy obeys, going out into the 13-degree weather outside the barracks. Sam worries that he doesn’t have enough fight in him, but his usefulness in the preparation for the upcoming battle can’t be dismissed. 

Their other more recent recruit, Brianne, is definitely more eager for the fight but has been able to bring only more strength powers to their group. As much as he likes the visual of Azazel being pelted with boulders, he believes it will be the demon-extraction power that will really help them. So far, only he, Max, and Scott have been able to do this. They need more demon practice, as risky as it is. 

“I’ll take Andy with me tomorrow morning and have him Jedi mind power us a new heater,” says Sam softly. 

Max nods, knowing that it’s him that Sam is addressing. 

“Two, so we have a backup!” demands Scott. “This thing could not have chosen a crappier time to crap out.”

“Let’s do another round,” Sam suggests. “Brianne, do you want to start us off?”

It’s obvious Brianne doesn’t want to. She’s behind the other Kids with her telepathy, but she’s not going to get any better without practice. She fidgets a bit, uncrossing her muscular legs and cocking her head from side-to-side before straightening up and closing her eyes. 

A minute passes, too long for the first message. That should be the easy one, but she’s still having trouble with words, has to tack hers on with pictures, so like an email attachment, it takes longer to adhere to the thought she needs to send. But then, Colly raises her hand under the blanket. “Got it... I think.”

The thought travels the room, each person raising their hand when they’ve received the message and then passing it on. Sam frowns when he hears the words “Potato with a tail,” already knowing they’ve fucked something up along the way, but still he sends it to Max, and because they are fluent in this language (though only with each other so far), the blond smiles at his intonation, deadpan use of ‘potato’ and the long snarky ‘A’ in tail.

Max repeats the words, and Brianne blushes furiously. She looks at the sentient pile of blankets angrily. “Colly!”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t hear a word. All I could see was a blob with a tail!”

“It was an elephant.” 

Scott snickers. “I’ll take an elephant, hold the chives.”

Most of them titter a bit. This is less formal than most of their practices, so Sam doesn’t tamp it down. 

‘She’ll get the hang of it,’ he hears in his head.

‘I’m not mad,’ Sam assures immediately. Max is always looking out for his moods, and it’s a good thing too, because, before starting the camp, he’d thought he was a patient guy. The more students they add, the tenser he is. Tonight though, he’s feeling pretty good. He’s glad to put more space between him and 1999 and with the new year comes the promise of revenge. 

Scott offers to go next. He then sends around the ridiculous image of a crocodile in a business suit. This persists for several rounds of each person offering up the silliest animal combination they can concoct. It’s a nice way to pass a too-cold evening. 

Sam wishes he had money of his own so they didn’t have to resort to this, but they are trying to stop a very evil force, even if that will be little consolation to the store’s manager when inventory time comes around. Andy’s standing on the horizontal bar that runs along the bottom back of the cart like a kid. Shoplifting always perks up their normally chill mental manipulator. The store is nearly empty, both in customers and stock, an effect of the extended snowstorm. They pick a different model from the last one in the hopes that it will have a more impressive lifespan. Against his own conscience, he adds a second one. Scott hadn’t been wrong that it was a good idea to have a backup. 

“What else should we get?” asks Andy. “Stereo system?”

Sam frowns, feeling a buzz of annoyance like a cloud of bees in the back of his skull. Then, the sensation intensifies, and he realizes that, rather than being an impending headache brought on by the immaturity of his comrades-in-arms, he’s picking up something. His demon radar has a blip. “Stay here. I’m… sensing something outside.”

Andy flips him a thumbs up. “I’ll keep shopping,” he says with a conspiratorial wink.

What an idiot, Sam thinks.

The exit door jangles as he pushes through it. The alarm raised by his senses is far more persistent. He takes a few steps into the miserable cold. He holds his jacket closed as he walks away from the building, following the trail like a bloodhound. Demon, the feel and scent unmistakable. It’s sulfur and hopelessness. He looks with his eyes too. The street isn’t busy, most folks smart enough to be in heated environments rather than strolling around in a Maine January. Each step increases the sensation of wrongness and dread. His hands twitch, eager to dispel a demon. He should have Andy with him for this, but he’s so green and such an idiot, that something in his gut tells him to give the boy more time before shoving him into a real demonic purging. He’s still within sight of the store.

There’s a man sitting on a bus bench. METRO it reads on the sign. Creative. Sam approaches cautiously. He debates tugging out the demon before it can notice him. That slight hesitation is the opportunity that the figure needs. 

“Are you going to have a seat with me, Sam?”

Sam’s heart thuds loudly and a burst of adrenaline creates a swirl in his stomach, an increase in his light acuity, and a primitive anger. Even still, his feet carry him to the other side of the bus bench. He has to see it for himself because he knows on a very deep personal level who this is. It looks like a man in his 40s, strong nose, cleft chin, and skin-colored lips. It looks like the lead on a construction job, not a Satanic zealot. It freezes his blood to see the lightly-colored irises that he’d been expecting. ‘Azazel is the only demon with yellow eyes that I know of!’ the demon in Las Vegas had screamed. He thinks of the night on the hood of the impala, a six-pack opening up his and Dean’s conversation, sharing the same story even though they didn’t know it. This is the thing that tore apart his family, killed his mother, infected him with a poison that tainted everything… and it’s smiling. 

His hand comes up and he feels the swirling mass that is the demon inside the vessel. It’s enormous and chaotic, like a literal tornado of malicious intent. He doesn’t even know where to begin harnessing it, where to grab hold. He reaches out… and nothing. It’s like his muscle stops flexing. Like he’s not even trying. The mechanism, the action isn’t even an option. It’s like psychic paralysis.

“Enough of that,” says Azazel. “You can’t harm me. I thought you were the brightest one.” Its yellow eyes sparkle with smug glee. “Have a seat,  _ Sammy _ .”

“Don’t call me that!” Sam hisses. He’ll die fighting this thing right now if he blasphemes against Dean again. That is only his beautiful brother’s name to use.

“Testy.” Azazel says. “Guess you didn’t like your guardian angel’s little surprise, huh? She really should have told you. I mean, fucking your own brother…”

He goes insane. That’s the only explanation for his pulling a gun (a gun of all things!) on the demon. He cocks it, not even understanding that what he’s doing is nonsensical. He just wants it to shut up. He wants it dead so bad that it hurts. He’d rather have this thing dead than to grow old and die happy with Dean. “You shut your mouth.”

“How about instead I give you a little encouragement. I know about your ‘camp,’ Sam. I know you’ve got your little army that you’re raising, and boy, that could not be more in tune with what I need. So, you keep it up, and do your blood father proud, would you?”

He discharges the gun in a public space at what seems to be a bystander waiting for the bus. The loud bang attracts more attention from the handful of people on the street than it does from the demon. There’s a hole in the demon’s chest and it couldn’t care less. “I’ll see you again, Sam. When you’re ready.” He looks down. “It might be a while, yet.”

He’s panicking now, the gun hanging limply in his hand, Azazel there and immune to his demon extraction and to the bullet in its chest. He hears shouts of people... witnesses. He wants to stay, wants to claw the yellow eyes right from its head, but he can’t. It won’t do any good. He knows that, and he sees Andy popping his head out of the store wondering what’s going on.

He’d underestimated his enemy. Chal would be so disappointed in him. He has no time to dwell but his brain is trying anyway. This changes everything. He’s too weak. He’s never felt too weak, not with this, not with the power that makes him so different from everyone else. He’s scared. 

“Get to the truck!” he yells at Andy, and he starts to run.

* * *

Elephant Butte Lake, New Mexico - February 2001

It’s a little cool of a day for this (not even maxing 60 degrees), but the sky is clear, and there’s no one else around for as far as Dean can see. The water makes gentle lapping noises at the side of Will Bailey’s homemade fiberglass boat, and other than the occasional buzz of a flying insect, that’s it. He thinks to himself how he could get used to the peacefulness, but he’s kidding himself if he thinks this kind of day wouldn’t drive him loony in a week’s time. He’s too used to Baby’s purr and the blast of gunfire. Willa’s got her feet up on the side, body reclining on one of the boat’s two benches. He notices the rise and fall of her breasts in the tight yellow top as much as the gorgeous landscape around them, and he knows that she’d enjoy that if she noticed. 

Dean’s not mature enough to see the signs for Elephant Butte without laughing, but he can appreciate how this place looks like one of the big pictures hung up on a doctor’s office wall. It beckons you, saying here is someplace where you will be truly free of worries. For the moment, it’s keeping its promise. He can’t remember the last time he felt so relaxed. 

“Is there more beer in there?” asks Dean, looking at the cooler she’d brought. He figures, knowing her, there will be, but it’s rude to just sort of snoop around.

She’s got her sunglasses on, but he can see her lashes, notices she doesn’t even open her eyes. “Of course.”

Standing on a boat is trickier than he expected. He’d been teased about his bowlegs before, people asking him where his horse is or how long until he gets his land legs back, but he hasn’t spent much time riding or boating. He opens the cooler, and in addition to four more cans of beer and an already opened bag of tortilla chips, there’s a wad of pink tissue paper. “What’s this?” he asks, lifting the mysterious crinkly package.

She turns her neck. “Oh yeah, that’s for you.”

“A gift? Willa, you shouldn’t have.” His words are sarcastic, not actually expecting that it really is a gift. Inside is a little heart-shaped box of chocolates. He frowns at it, worried. Shit, it was February and they’d been hanging out every month or so. He’s been super clear about where his boundaries are, but maybe she’s caught feelings. Well, she has feelings. He does too, if he’s honest, but maybe this is where she lowers the boom that she wants their relationship to go further. He wants to stuff the box back in with the beer, drown it underneath melting circles of ice.

“Phineas wants you to be his Valentine,” she jokes. 

He sets the chocolates back inside the cooler and cracks the beer before even sitting back down, guzzling some down as though it was a tequila shot and not a 5% ABV brewski. 

She sits up, upper body reclining on her elbows. Her curls are fighting with the moist air that hovers around the lake. “Relax Winchester, I saw it at the store and grabbed it. It’s not a ring. I know you still find me as sexy as this boat.”

She’s got one corner of her mouth tilted up and he can hear how lightly she says this. He sits back down on his own bench, legs towards her. “Should have brought poles if you wanted to go fishing.”

She lets out a sharp “Ha!” before swearing at him a little. 

“I actually got a Valentine’s Day call,” says Dean. “From my dad’s ex-girlfriend.”

“Leandra?” asks Willa, her face all pinched up in concentration.

“Chalendra. Close.” He’d spoken vaguely about Chal. She’s not advertising that she’s an ex-angel, so he’s not gonna tout that, and saying that she raised Sam makes it sound like Dad and her had dated way longer than they had. 

“You’re family’s kind of weird,” she says. He smiles broadly. Oh, she has no idea. “Did you tell her that you have sworn off romance?”

He’d considered telling Chal that people only celebrated the holiday with their sweethearts, but he knows she’s pining for John in the same way he’s pining for Sam, so he hadn’t. He’d wished her one too, asked her if she was going to watch rom-coms. She was.

“It’s not sworn off. It’s… on a hiatus.”

“Uh-huh. And how long is this hiatus gonna last? I know you said your ex left a mark, but that was at least…” she does the math, crunching how many months they’ve known each other. “10 months ago?”

“I’m just focusing on finding Sam,” he says, cryptically. 

“All work and no play, Dean,” Willa says, lying back with a contented sigh. “Wish I could come out here more often. Too bad Sanctuary can’t run without me.”

“Have you ever thought about selling it?”

“Not seriously. I mean, if I didn’t work at the bar, what would I do?” She’s got the smarts to do a lot of things, Dean knows, but he also knows that what you’re used to doing kind of locks you into place. “What would you do, if you weren’t a hunter?” 

“Easy. I’d go crazy.” 

“Yeah, but if you had to get a real grownup job.”

“A real grownup job?” he asks mockingly. He looks out over the water at the tracts of land, vertical stacks of dirt and rock. There are so many places to roam. “I don’t know. Trucker?”

She doesn’t laugh as he expects. “So you’re always going to be a wanderer?”

He shrugs, pulling another mouthful of cold beer. “I suppose.”

“Glad we’re just friends then,” Willa says. “I like you though, Dean.”

“I like you too, Junior,” he says, just to piss her off. 

If he’d thought to do this before: make a friend without sex to tangle up emotions, he might not have been so psychologically fucked by the time he’d met Sam. Just the monthly visits with someone who is a friend has curbed the loneliness, like a sort of nicotine patch for his heart. At this point, he feels closer to her than he does Dad, which isn’t saying much with the rift that’s come between them since they started traveling in separate vehicles. He’s scared, though, because they have this great thing going on and he’s super into her physically. He’s never been so conflicted before. He’s only ever had sex with one person that he cared about, and while he’s managed to half-ass his way through a few one nights since (they’d been awful, and not just because they weren’t Sam, and he’d regretted them immediately), it’d be nice to do that again, with penis and heart connected. She doesn’t exactly make it easy for him either.

“Ever fuck on a boat?” she asks. 

* * *

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - June 2002

When Miguel doesn’t turn up for his shift, Willa and Isabella take turns frying things up in the kitchen, rotating through their roles as bartender, server, and, for tonight, cook. It’s a slow night, thank the Lord, so they get by just fine, but him not calling is worrying. Miguel’s like any other employee, loyal to a point, with some flaky “I’m sick'' fake coughs hours before his shift, but he’s never just not shown up before. There’s no answer on his home line or his cellphone. If they had a normal hours job, Willa would just stop by his place on the way home, but since they close up at 2 a.m., with some end of the night cleanup putting them out the door closer to three, she waits until noon the next day to make her way over to the cluster of apartment complexes off of highway 25. It’s probably not a big deal, just Miguel finally getting tired of smelling like tater tots and ground beef, and sabotaging the humble but stable job he’s got, but if he’s hurt, she’s not going to be found slackin’ around. 

She parks in front of the gated playground. She’s never seen it in use; there are never any kids climbing the metal pipe structure that forms a bowl over the assorted jagged rocks that serve as ground. Of course, she hasn’t been over very often since he’s only lived here maybe seven months. It’s weirder between them now that she’s his boss; it was easier to be casual when it was Daddy who employed him and she was just his school friend who got him the job. 

Miguel is in unit 522 and she still doesn’t get how the numbering system works because he’s next door to 542 and kitty-corner to 702. All the apartments have window air conditioning units held in place with wood planks, some with blankets stuffed in the extra space. It hasn’t been that hot yet, but it’s a bitch to take them down once they’re up; better to just leave them up so they’re ready to go when New Mexico summers take over. The first thing she notes when stepping up to his unit is the broken salt line across the front door. It’s not a red flag, but a yellow one; the winds can get crazy, especially this time of year, and it’s not like there’s a lot of trees to block it. It probably means that Miguel hasn’t been coming and going a lot if he hasn’t bothered refreshing it. Her ears pick up the sounds of a TV but she thinks it’s coming from a neighbor. She knocks. After a few moments, she knocks again, but harder. If he’s lying incapacitated in there, she’ll have to involve the landlord to get inside. She tries not to picture him as she’d last seen her daddy, skin colorless and body inert. The longer the door goes unanswered, the more her anxiety picks up. She thinks about kicking it down.

The door opens. Willa’s relief lasts only a fraction of a second. Miguel opens the door only partially, his upper body leaning into view. He’s wearing sunglasses… inside his apartment. His hair is neat, possibly with some sort of gel on it. Instead of a t-shirt with a logo of a video game or some company who was giving out free swag, he’s wearing a button-up shirt, and there in the center of his chest is a long narrow strip of fabric. It’s a tie.

“Hi,” Willa says. “You… I thought…” She can hear her thoughts start and stop like car tires screeching in her head. “I came to check up on you... You didn’t show up last night.”

He smiles, but without any obvious enjoyment. “I wasn’t feeling well.” He doesn’t even bother putting effort into the lie, not that he’s got much ground to stand on since he’s standing here dressed all fancy like he’s going to a job interview or something. She hopes it’s a job interview; her hunter’s intuition is telling her something else. 

“Well, why didn’t you call?”

“As I said, I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Too sick to even call?” She’s not even trying to hide her confusion from him. Why should she? He’s her friend and she’s known him for years. “Are you gonna come in tonight?”

“Afraid not.” He shakes his head minimally. Then, he exaggerates getting an idea, finger raising up and head tilting to the side. “In fact, I think I should probably quit now. You see, I’ve gotten another job offer and I’ll be starting that right away.”

This isn’t how Miguel talks and it certainly isn’t how he acts. He would never leave Willa and Sanctuary in the lurch. She is convinced instantly that this person standing in Miguel’s half-open door, the one wearing a tie and sunglasses and casually throwing away his job and his friendship, isn’t Miguel. 

Heeding that survival training, she acts. 

“You’re not even giving me a notice? This is so like you to do! You just flake out on everything!” She waves her arms. “Well, you know what, Miguel, the bar is better off without you!”

The sunglassed face has no visible reaction. She’s expected to storm off now. She’d rather push her way into the apartment. She’d rather fight him, rescue Miguel. She stands there, torn, because her smart and her brave are duking it out.

He reaches out a hand, still not having invited her inside and not stepped over the threshold himself. It touches her cheek. She smells… sulfur. Her stomach quivers, all too aware what that smell means, and she tries not to jerk her face away. “Try not to be too angry, Willa.”

She’s not good enough of an actress to hide the loathing that rises up in her, stronger a sensation but similar to overwhelming nausea. “Go to hell,” she says, turning her heel and her back to the demon. Though she braces herself, it never attacks, and she makes it back to her truck unattacked. She climbs in quickly anyway, tearing out of the parking lot as though pursued. 

She’d just been touched by a demon. She’d wondered if she’d ever see one for herself and now there was one possessing her friend. Her truck runs on autopilot to the bar; it’s only a few miles anyway. How to save Miguel? She’s known other hunters that have faced demons, though she suspects a lot of the ones she’s known were lying. It rarely went well for the person possessed, even if they did manage to get the demon out. 

While her head does some figuring out, her lips recite prayers, a response as automatic as driving to Sanctuary. By the time that she lets herself into the bar, she’s over the worst of her fear response. She re-salts the entrances as she dials in Dean’s number. “We’ve got a demon,” she says without preamble. “It's got Miguel.”

Dean’s got Baby’s trunk popped up and is going through its formidable supernatural arsenal when John Winchester arrives, pulling the Sierra Grande up beside him. It’s been months, and his heart lightens when he sees the only family he’d believed he had for most of his life. “Hey, Dad,” his deep abiding love audible even in the small sentence.

“Dean,” grunts John. He stretches, tilting his upper half back as far as it will go, hearing several pops along his spine, before reaching out a hand to pat his son’s shoulder. He squints his eyes at the bar. “You been in yet?”

“Nah, we’ve beat Willa here. I was just checking that everything’s all set for hunting.” 

“Good,” says John with a curt nod. As though he’d forget one of Dad’s primary tenets of hunting. He’s long thought that Dad should put out a manual for hunters. Civilians would think it was a gag book, just fiction, but it could be really helpful for newer hunters, people who just got dragged into the underbelly of reality and were wanting to avenge others or protect themselves. Dad thinks it’s a ridiculous idea, acting like giving out trade secrets would give the monsters an advantage.

Dean closes the back, hears the satisfying click as it latches firmly into place. He’d never be able to just go through weaponry and magic shit if it was night, but it’s 11 am and there’s no one looking to get a brew at this time of day. 

“So, how’s it looking out there?” he asks Dad, conversationally. They don’t converse as easily now as they had when they were together on the road. Everything feels like small talk or dire consequence drama, nothing in between. It’s either ‘weather’s bad in OKC’ or ‘took a bite to the shoulder, but the stitches are healing fine.’

“It’s a nightmare, like always,” says Dad, ever the optimist. “I think it’s picking up, too. A couple others have noticed. More demons, specifically.”

“Bad for everyone else, but good for us,” says Dean and he deserves the glare that Dad shoots at him. Yeah, demons are nothing to be light-hearted about. He just always gets his hopes up that each new demon presents the opportunity to find Sam, or to kill Yellow Eyes so that when they do find Sam, he might be more inclined to stay with them.

He kicks at the rocks in the asphalt parking lot, watches them skitter. They don’t make any more small talk, but it isn’t long before Willa’s Chevy Silverado rolls in. When she hops down from the passenger seat, he can see that she’s wearing the weight of her friend’s possession hard. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a few days. Her hair is wet and pulled into a ponytail. Her lips are chapped but look just as kissable as they had the first night he’d met her, and he really needs to adjust his thinking, cause thinking with his dick has never served him well, and definitely never will before a hunt. 

She smiles a troubled smile. “Hey, guys. Come on.” 

As they follow and then wait for her to get the bar’s door unlocked, Dad gives him a look. It’s accusatory, and he tries to keep his eyes wide and innocent to deny the allegation. He gets why his dad would think that, because he has no way of knowing how his heart has suffered from Sam’s abandonment, but the only objectionable behavior between them in the year that they’ve known each other was the time when Willa had changed her clothes with Dean in the room, and (with her express permission) he hadn’t looked away. She said she wanted him to know what he was missing, and boy, does he know.

She leads them to the office, a storage closet with a rusted metal 3-drawer filing cabinet, a popup wood laminate desk, a wheeled chair with barely any padding left, and a stack of papers with a visible layer of dust and crumbs along its top and sides. 

“Sorry, I know it’s not exactly roomy in here.” She digs around in one of the cabinet drawers and produces a maroon folder. She passes it to Dean, but Dad grabs it rudely from her hand, asserting his dominance over the hunt. He peeks over Dad’s shoulder. Inside is a Xerox’ed driver’s license of Miguel Rodriquez. Dean does some quick math with the date of birth. The card says he’s 23. He’s also 5’8, 141 lbs., brown hair, brown eyes. “That was from when he started working here about 4 or 5 years ago,” says Willa. “He’s always in a baseball cap… normally…Sorry, I just realized what he normally wears isn’t going to help you.” Her voice shakes a little. Dean reaches out a hand and pats her upper arm. “Last I saw he was in a suit and tie, and his hair was all slicked up.”

Dean can’t reconcile the image of Miguel covered by a dirty smock, hairnet just showing underneath his cap with him in a suit and tie. Miguel’s a good guy, a little long-winded and prone to bragging about really pointless shit, but good. 

“And, I’ll write down directions to his apartment.” She snatches up a post-it note from the holder and a blue Bic. She writes until both sides are filled with words. “He’s got a slider that leads to a fenced-in two by ten dirt patio. The salt line over his front door was broken. I didn’t check the back.”

She offers up the yellow square to John, understanding the power dynamic between them. “Thanks. Were you wanting to join us?” 

Dean’s honestly surprised. His dad’s not a misogynist or anything, at least not a real bad one, but he’s always so big on personal responsibilities for the hunts. He rarely hunts as a team. It’s a loud declaration of how much he must have respected Willa’s dad.

She lowers her eyes, giving her answer before she speaks a word. “No, I don’t want to be there for that. I would, I mean if I had to…”

“But you don’t,” says Dean. “We’ll take care of it.”

And this way, they’ll get the chance to interrogate the demon, see if he knows anything about Yellow Eyes or Sam, in the unlikely chance that there’s a lead there. It would be too awkward to do that with her being there, them torturing her friend. Dean’s not even sure he can do it, and he only considers the guy an acquaintance. 

“Thanks again, Willa. We’ll be in touch. Dean, I’ll meet you out front in five.” 

Another unexpected move on Dad’s part. He’s used to having to heel. He can’t remember the last time Dad didn’t just assume that Dean was behind him. It’s thoughtful, especially since he thinks there’s some romance going on between him and Willa. Maybe that three months with Chal had opened his heart. 

Willa slides into him, wrapping him in a tight squeeze. She’s about a half a foot shorter than he is, so he hunches over to rest his chin on top of her head. Her hair smells like tropical fruit. “We’ll do our best to save Miguel,” he says. He can’t make her a promise, but he wishes he could. 

“I know you will, but I also know how dangerous exorcisms are. I’ll be prayin’ for you guys the whole time. If it runs into night, I’ll stick up a closed note on the door.”

Dean doesn’t think it’ll do a fat lot of good, but if it eases her mind in any way, makes her feel like she’s helping them, then he’s all for it, even if his first thought is, ‘Ask him to stop making demons while he’s at it.’ He always keeps his eyes open when she says grace, too. Blasphemy comes easy to Winchesters. “You do that. I’ll call the moment we’ve got the thing out of him.”

Her eyes are gentle and a little sunken when she looks up at him. He knows she wants him to kiss her. He doesn’t, at least not on the lips. He presses his lips to her forehead instead, and she does her best to not look disappointed.

Outside, Dad’s already in the Sierra Grande. He’s got the window down, and he crooks a finger at Dean, as though Dean wasn’t going to walk over anyway. “You be careful with that girl.”

There’s a part of him, too large a part, that’s ashamed to admit to his dad that he hasn’t slept with Willa. He likes that Dad thinks of him as this great lady’s man. Women loved him, loved his diligent tongue when his dick wouldn’t work; it gave them the impression that he was a generous lover. They didn’t know he was just buying their company. He’d always kept the sleeping with men quiet, but been very vocal about the women, figuring that Dad wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that. In a way, it was easier with the men. If he bottomed, they didn’t even tend to notice there was anything off about him.

He doesn’t correct his father. “Yes, sir.” 

“Good.” He’s still mean-mugging him. Jesus, whose dad is this, his or hers?

“We all ready?” asks Dean. 

“Yep,” says John. 

They’re not ready.

* * *

Lawrence, Kansas - May 2002

Chalendra’s got a gloved fist full of moist dirt when her phone rings. She knows that Dean’s on a hunt today, so she has to answer. She sets the clump down and after removing her gloves, pulls her cell phone from its place in the deep pocket at the front of her overalls. She nearly drops the phone when she sees the caller ID. Her heart thumps to the front of her chest like Cujo throwing herself against her cage, and it actually hurts. She can’t breathe. She presses the call button.

“This is Chalendra Ackles.”

There’s a pause, just long enough for the fear that it was a misdial to churn her insides. “Yeah, it’s John.”

John Winchester. The man whom she had given her heart to, her virginity to, the man who had sired two wonderful sons, one who loved her and one who despised her for good reason. His voice is rough like his hands, and she has missed both, and more. She’s crying already, and the phone trembles in her hands.

“Dean wanted me to call you. He’s been hurt on a hunt. It’s bad.”

The elation that had started only 20 seconds before fizzles out as though it had never appeared. Her hand steadies, and she’s standing up from her knees. “Will he survive?”

“Yeah, he’s stable. He’s… well, we’re both pretty banged up, but he… Dean lost an eye.”

Her body’s making its way inside the house, her mind already going over the things that she’ll need. With the hand not holding the phone, she unclasps her overalls. “Where is he?”

John sighs. “I gotta tell you. Dean wants you here, but I sure as shit don’t. I don’t know why he’s still…” he stops, anger silencing him. 

His anger matters, it really does, and she’s sure that it will feel like a newly created knife wound later, but right now, she just needs to get to Dean, Dean’s who has been hurt and lost an eye. “Tell me the city and hospital and I’ll be there by this evening.”

He hesitates again. She pulls down her luggage, starts tossing in clothes while she waits. She knows that Willa owns the Sanctuary Bar in New Mexico, and she knows it was her employee they were exorcising today. She will call every hospital in New Mexico if she has to. She doesn’t have to. John finally gives up the name of the hospital, but he takes long enough for her to start on the toiletries. 

“I’ll catch the first flight out.” She thinks she’ll probably be flying into Denver and renting a vehicle to cover the rest of the way, but she’ll have to check with the airline to confirm that. She doesn’t know the layout of America as well as the two Winchesters do. “Did you lose any body parts?” she asks.

“Just my son’s eye,” John says bleakly. “He’s under the name Allen West.”

“Right.” She wants to say something, but what to say? She can’t ask for his forgiveness; she knows she doesn’t deserve it. It’s merciful that he ends the call for her.

“Right, well. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

“Yes, do that,” she says. The phone screen dims. She finishes packing while calling the airline and debates what’s to be done with the 340-pound waheela in the backyard. 

* * *

Sierra Vista Hospital - Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - June 2002

It’s never really quiet in hospitals, not even in the middle of the night. Dean wants to be back on the Elephant Butt Lake where the only sound is the licking sound of water on boat and pesky midges flying too close to the ear canal, tries to imagine it, like some sort of meditation exercise, but the swelling of the blood in his face is creating an unignorable drum beat. Add to that the beeping of the machines around him, the screeching of various alarms outside his semi-private room, the stampede of heavy feet (do doctors wear steel-toe boots?), and it’s more like a warzone than a place of recovery. 

One eye. ‘It’s too bad dad didn’t name me Willy,’ he thinks. That’s the drugs talking...thinking. It still hurts kind of, but it’s distant, muffled. His brain is slow...slower than usual. All the wires and the doo-dad on his finger (heart rate monitor, he guesses) coming out of him make him feel a bit Frankenstein’ed up. Modern medicine making bionic men. He opens his mouth to laugh, but he knows it will hurt more if he actually makes any percussive sound.

A nurse comes in, kinda handsome, but way too nice to be Dean’s type. The guy would never hold him down, pull his hair, leave teeth marks. “A demon tore out one of my eyes,” he tells the nurse before the man can even read his chart notes. 

“You told me that earlier,” says the nurse with a placating smile. He’s probably heard it all here, especially from patients on Morphine drips, if that’s what he’s on (Dean doesn’t know).

“Did I?” Wow, it hurts to scrunch his forehead. He’ll have to try to be less surprised for a while. “I didn’t even think I’d met ya. Did I tell you how handsome you are?”

“Nope, that’s a new one.” The nurse isn’t taking his words to heart. He’s too busy jotting down notes on the clipboard he’d snatched up from the end of Dean’s bed. “How’s your pain?”

“It’s there, but it’s far away too,” says Dean cryptically. 

“Scale of one to ten?” asks the nurse.

“Three and ten.” He can feel the three, the ten is lurking in the fog like a swamp monster. 

The nurse puts the clipboard back in place. “Your mother is here.”

Dean remembers his mom a little, her smell, her laugh, sandwiches, her and Dad fighting, wondering why she didn’t come out of the burning Lawrence house. “My mom’s dead. Demon got her too. I don’t have very good luck with demons, Mister nurse.”

Again the mollifying smile that doesn’t reach the guy’s eyes, both eyes cause he has two, unlike Dean. “Well, that may be but she’s here, and I told her I’d check to see if you were up for her visit.”

“I want Chal,” Dean says. “Is she here yet?”

“I don’t know about her, but do you want to see your mother?”

“Sure,” Dean says, confused. He hopes she’s not on fire still, but then, he realizes that’s a silly thing to think. No fire could burn that long without more fuel. “My head hurts.”

“Must be one of the 10 moments. It should go back to 3 soon. You just buzz that button if it stays at a 10 more often than a 3, okay?” He points to a button on Dean’s left side. Dean gives him a thumbs up.

After the nurse leaves, he closes his eyes to sleep. He thinks he can’t because of the pounding and the beeping and the stamping. He thinks of the boat and Willa on her back on the bench. She’s got sunglasses on and the beer bottle is wet from melting ice. And there’s a demon with gaping black sockets where there should be eyes and he feels the thing’s fingers like claws ripping, tearing, pulling. 

He gasps, his body sweaty and covered in tubes, and Chalendra is there. He understands now that this is his visiting mother, and it’s just fine that she isn’t his birth mother, even if she’s really weird. She’s looking at him so tenderly, with huge dollops of tears on both sides of her cheeks. “Mom,” he says, and, since he’s already sitting up, he just reaches for her, and she tries the best she can to hug him from the side of the bed. He sobs into her, his very padded head against her collar bone. She runs her hands over his back, and cries with him. 

Eventually, the hiccups of his emotional reaction taper, and he wipes at his remaining eye. He has no idea if under the nest of cotton his eye socket is crying. He’ll have to learn the gross stuff when everything isn’t being numbed by the painkillers. For now, he eases off his tight strangle on Chal’s body, looks at her. 

Her eyes are red and puffy, already large nose bigger with snot, and her scalp is visible, the hair buzzed down to a tight fuzz. “Where’d your hair go?” he asks. He reaches up to feel it. It’s like a kiwi fruit. 

“I removed it with an electric shaver,” she says. 

“I like how it feels.” There’s a dopey awe to his voice. “Dad called you?”

She nods. “I felt faint when I saw his name on my phone,” she confesses.

Somehow, he laughs. “I bet. Was he a dick to you?”

“No, but he said he didn’t want me here.”

It’s touching that Dad put Dean’s wishes over his own. He’s super convinced now that the little three-month relationship they’d had changed John Winchester for the better. It occurs to him that he hasn’t seen his dad in hours. “Is he okay?” Again, he hurts when his brows furrow. Well, he hurts anyway, but it spikes when he does that. He has to try and keep his face still. Smashing it into Chal hadn’t hurt for some reason, at least, it hadn’t while he’s on the meds. 

“I haven’t seen him yet. He said that he was banged up, but not as bad as you.”

“Yeah, it took my eye.” The visuals of the moment are trapped in his head, repeating. It’s the last thing that eye ever saw: fingers coming for it. The clawing. It felt like it could get all the way to his brain. He shakes all over. “Just reached in and gouged it out.”

Immediately, he’s wrapped back up against her, and his breath is coming in shaky bursts. This is with the drip of happy meds in his IV bag. He wonders how this is going to feel once those are gone. He might need a shrink. Heh, his shrink would have a field day about him and Sam. Well, they can’t blame his mom for how he turned out.

“Willa is waiting to see you, too. They wouldn’t let her in to see you. Family only for now.”

“Willa?” he asks, tipping his head back up. “She came to see me?”

“Of course.”

He’s never had a visitor at the hospital other than Dad. Now he’s got two. It makes him feel cared about. “How’d you find her?”

“This isn’t a large hospital, and her curly red hair stands out. I told her who I was. Is that okay?” Chal looks worried. She doesn’t know that Dean talks to Willa about everything but the creepy incest shit. 

“Yeah, she knows you. I tell her everything, everything but the creepy incest shit.” He says, feeling better now that he’s gotten out some of his tears, and not in a state to yet regret the lack of filter he has right now. But, this is Chal, and so she doesn’t react like a human. She just nods, asks him about his pain, and offers to fetch him anything he needs, just as though he hadn’t just talked about sex with his baby brother. There’s another reason to love Chal. It’s probably hard to be judgy when you’re a fallen angel, though. 

Willa was right; he’s got a weird family.

* * *

John’s got cracked ribs, not his first rodeo there, from being kicked while he was on the ground, a face that looks like hamburger, the demon’s buddy had taken a special delight in a lower left jaw punch so he’s gonna be eating through a straw for a while, a dislocated shoulder from being tackled while flinging Dean’s inert body into the Sierra Grande, and three fractured fingers from any number of things, take your pick. 

He hadn’t expected an ambush, and that was on him. They were lucky it was only three demons. They were lucky they were alive. John and Dean had put up a good fight, but he knows, knows deep in his instinct bone that they’d let them go, and that’s fucking terrifying. He doesn’t understand their motivations at all.

He feels like they failed Willa since they’d botched saving her employee so badly. She’s got a weak cup of coffee in her hand and is staring blankly at the TV in the upper corner of the room. The sounds on, but low, and it’s an old western show that John doesn’t recognize. She’d waved away his apology, tried to take some responsibility, but he knew who was to blame: him, as usual. 

He’s planning on checking in one more time on his son and then finding the nearest motel for some necessary shut-eye when Chalendra, fallen angel and second love of his life walks into the waiting room. She’s got no hair and she’s been crying, but man, has she got presence even like this. Her clothes are unusually baggy, but he knows the muscles underneath, knows how she feels underneath. Their eyes meet and it’s the first time he’s seen her since before her over-the-phone confession, but he hears the fear and devastation in her voice from that call, even if some of the individual words are lost to shock and time. She doesn’t look one iota better than total devastation now. He’s up out of the chair and on his way to her without thinking about it. She looks like a woman who has lost everything. He should be happy about that, but he isn’t.

She had participated in all his life’s tragedies and he hadn’t even known it. She’d been there while Mary was burning and snatched Sam right out of the arms of Azazel while he’d been trying to find him. It was surreal to think he’d just met her two years ago when she’d been there during that, his darkest night. She’d been on his fucking front lawn twenty years ago. He’s grateful, so fucking grateful, that she’d saved his younger son, but he hates, hates that she hadn’t just shown up at that first hotel, the one they’d stayed in for two weeks while John had tried to drink himself to death, with the baby in her arms giving him back. 

What he’d seen that night had changed him. It was the unveiling of his eyes to the world as it truly existed underneath soda pop commercials and spray-on tans. He wasn’t just grieving a wife and son, which alone was enough to kill a man, but reality. Mary was dead, Sam was gone, and the monsters were real. Would giving him back Sam that night have been enough? He thinks this boneheaded revenge lifestyle would still have been likely, but at least he could have done it with both his sons. Did she think he couldn’t handle it? Maybe she had thought he’d bury his head in the fucking sand, wouldn’t practice fighting til his arms were ready to drop or shooting until he smelled like gunpowder 24/7. 

“I wish I’d had the choice,” he says to her, because she’s standing in front of him with round scared eyes and a heart as open as any he’d known. “You took that from me when you took Sam.”

She nods, tears springing up, ready to tread already existing pathways down her cheeks. She still loves him. God, he can feel it. And she loves his boys, the one she’d stolen and raised, and the one she’d just met but whose bedside she’d rushed to like a rabbit startled out of a bush. 

“If you’ve got more that you’ve done to me that I don’t know about, I want to hear it.”

She shakes her head, still mute. The tears talk for her. 

And this is why he hadn’t wanted to see her again or to hear her voice. Dean thinks he’s cold-hearted, robotic, but only a man that loved with the kind of ferocity John had loved Mary with could have kept this fire for retribution going as long as he had. It’s different this time; ironically, it feels less fated. Falling in love with Mary had been in easy steps, a little tricky with her dad’s disapproval, but similar to how every man woos his wife. This, what he has with Chal is unexpected, random, like her. He loves her wholly. It’s easier to stay mad when she’s not here in front of him, worried sick about his children, and hoping desperately for a kind word from him. He has no kind words, but he still loves. “I don’t want one more secret, one more lie, ever again.” 

“I swear before God and his angels to never keep a secret from you again.” 

He shakes his head. “Don’t be cute. Mean it.” 

Her mouth holds firm for a second, as if offended that he could think she was joking. When she speaks again, it’s in Enochian. He can tell by the natural rumble of it. A promise in the language of the angels. Well, he can hardly demand more than that, he supposes. 

He reaches out for her, forgetting his condition, and she knocks the breath from him. He yelps for his crushed ribs, spots appearing before his eyes. She backs off immediately, horrified and ignorant about the state of his wounds, of all the wrappings under his shirt. “Yeah, that’ll have to wait a while,” he says.

The kiss, apparently doesn’t. It transports him right back to that first date making out in a movie theater like a couple of teenagers. Some of the weight in his heart eases. Forgiveness is tough for him, but so is giving up.

Behind him, he hears Willa. “Not an ex-girlfriend anymore.”

* * *

Portland, Oregon - June 2002

Ava Wilson waits under the hardware store’s awning for Sam to make his entrance. She’s shivering from the adrenaline pumping through her. She’s a million miles from home, and, after a year of training with Azazel, she’s about to kill someone. She’d resisted the yellow-eyed demon at first, but his way of thinking had eventually wormed its way into her head. First, he’d given her advice about getting rid of the headaches when the visions came. A small thing, but it was a comfort; that, and, he’d known and believed her visions which no one but her mom did, but only once she’d presaged the cancer in her left breast. Second, he’d told her that she could control the shadowy figures that appeared in her room. She hadn’t believed him when he said that it was her nightmares that caused them. She hadn’t known she had the power to summon what Azazel called ‘lesser demons.’ She was making them in her sleep, and hadn’t even known it. She’d asked him to show her how to make them go away. That was when he’d started to tutor her.

She went in knowing he was evil. No one with yellow eyes and a viper’s smile was going to be good. As a teenage girl with control issues who was always underestimated, it appealed to her, this being singled out as special, even while she hated being different. It doesn’t bother her that she is on the wrong side, not as long as things happen according to her plans. 

Killing Sam isn’t her choice, but Azazel has offered to stop the visions for good, not just their ensuing headache, if she does this. That he hadn’t offered that from the get-go tells her all she needs to know about what a tool he sees her as. Well, for her, he’s a means to end. He’s no lifelong best friend, but he’s kept his promises so far, and she likes the idea of a world with her in charge. 

The demon had bought her plane tickets. She hadn’t realized that demons used credit cards. The gun, she’d bought herself. She’s rightfully proud of her demon-controlling ability, but in her vision, her target had looked tall and strong, and it was never a bad idea to have a backup plan. 

After an hour of waiting, which lowers her nerves but intensifies her desire to get this over with, Sam appears, climbing out of a huge truck. He’s got shaggy brown hair and he’s as young as she is. He smiles politely as he walks to the doorway in which she’s taken shelter. 

“Are you Sam?”

His smile vanishes. He… smells her? Is that what he’s doing? His nostrils are flaring wide and his posture leans toward her. “Who are you?”

“I...I’m Ava. Ava Wilson.” Why did she tell him her whole name? It doesn’t matter though, does it? She either succeeds and it doesn’t matter cause he’s dead or she fails and it doesn’t matter because he’ll kill her first. “I… I need to talk to you.”

“...Okay.” 

“Somewhere more private?” she asks. She’d already cased the joint, that was what killers called it, right? She’d checked the area to see where a good private place was to shoot someone in the head, not your average weekday activity. She knows that there’s an empty loading bay with no cameras behind the building. She’d dyed her hair, in case someone sees and put on these ridiculous fake glasses that are fogging up in the humidity. 

Sam is suspicious. She gets the feeling he’s used to that. That seems like an easy guess, though, since he’s someone who a demon prince of Hell wants dead. 

“Just… I…” It sounds like a trap to say, ‘Hey, come around to the back alley with me’ so she panics about her wording. “Not far, just not out in front. I have a crazy story for you.”

She begins to walk, hoping he’ll follow, and he does. He looms behind her in a way that makes her glad that there’s a gun in her pocket. It’s messed up. She’s the one… well, whatever. Can’t break millions of years of survival instinct.

Amazingly, they get to the loading bay. The building has a jutting top, probably to keep freight dry, so they don’t have to stand in the rain. Sam stops when she does. “This is about Azazel, right?”

Azazel. She panics. He knows that the demon sent her. She doesn’t know if she should deny it or not. Would talking even help here? ‘Focus!’ she yells at herself. If she’s going to do this, she’s going to do this right. “I don’t know that name.” As she’s speaking the words aloud, she calls forth demons. Multitasking abilities of a front-desk receptionist right there. There’s three that hear her call. She can feel them materialize around them. She hopes three is enough. “I had a vision about you. I get those sometimes. They suck. They hurt my head like a bitch, but they always come true.”

Sam nods, trusting her for some reason. “I believe you,” he says. “What did you see?” Then, his nostrils flare again and he looks around them. He had been smelling her, checking for that farty smell that happens when demons are near. She pets the gun in her pocket even as she commands them to come forward. 

The rain falls differently where they are, clouds of evil, moving stealthily towards Sam. He cries out, “Watch out!” and valiantly puts his back to her in order to defend them from the demons. Unbelieving, she watches him stick his hand out and snuff one out, not even dispersing the cloud, but erasing it entirely. Fuck. That’s why Azazel wants Sam dead. 

It doesn’t explain why he’d sent her to kill him. 

Fear and comprehension mingle in her mind. She’s a suicide bomb. She summons more, finds only two, but by the time they appear, he’s already made a second one vanish. 

He looks back at her for a moment, reads her face. “You’re doing this somehow, aren’t you?” he asks before taking out the third and the fourth ones, both hands outstretched now.

She swallows the 6 tons of saliva in her mouth, and grabs the gun in her pocket. When she cocks back the trigger (fuck, why hadn’t she practiced this part?) he hears it, and his body starts to turn. She fires. If he hadn’t turned, she’d have got his back, lack of proper aim or not, but she gets his shoulder instead. She screams, even though she was the shooter. 

Before she can squeeze the next bullet out, he tackles her, right there onto the hard ground of the parking lot, and she knows she’s going to die. “What are you doing?” he demands, kind voice turned mean, not that she can blame him. 

“I have to kill you!” She struggles to raise the gun, but there’s no use there; he’s too much stronger than her. She calls out to the demons, demands more with the authority Azazel had taught her to fake until it became real. Instead of sensing their approach in the vicinity around her, she feels something in her head. It’s not unlike the migraines she used to get from the visions. It clouds into the side of her vision. She pulls the trigger again, not even caring where she’s aiming, and he jerks. Shit, had she done it?

No. All she’d succeeded in doing is further angering the cloud in her. It’s Sam. He’s growing there, pushing everything to the side, growing larger and larger in her skull. 

‘What are you doing?’ she thinks.

She feels weaker, her vision dimmer. He’s found something in her and he’s… feeding off it. Feeding off of her. Oh god, she really is going to die this way. She doesn’t want her own murderer to be the last thing that she sees. Her energy, that strange psychic power she has, he’s consuming it somehow, and it’s killing her. ‘What are you doing to me?’ she cries out. 

‘I don’t know!’ He sounds afraid too, and then there is just blackness.

* * *

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - July 2002

“Okay, there’s no way that you could possibly need this because I don’t even know what hell it is.”

The item in Dean’s hand looks like a hangable picture frame for eggs. That can’t be right, but it has oval slots and a chicken painted at the top. It’s also covered in at least ten years of kitchen grease and dust. 

Willa snatches it from his hand in annoyance. The hoarder apple doesn’t fall far from the hoarder tree, as Dean has come to see over the last week. At first, he’d suspected that she was just hesitating on so much of the crap to keep him there longer, but she genuinely has to do crazy mental contortions with each item, trying to Sherlock possible scenarios she may someday be in that could necessitate not throwing away each knick-knack. It would be impressive if it wasn’t so damned frustrating. 

After what has to be a full two minutes of staring at the thing, attempting to come up with what this thing could possibly be. She wants so badly to be able to say, ‘That’s a doodle bopple and it’s for displaying chicken eggs,’ but she can’t. She finally passes it back to him without comment, and he puts it into one of the large black trash bags with no small amount of schadenfreude. 

They’d agreed on a trade. Each one’s baggage for the other, not that they’d phrased it that way. They’d called it “trying to move on.” He’d offered to try to put his reservations about having sex with her (more to the point, someone that wasn’t Sam, but he hadn’t gone into the specifics with her) aside and she’d asked for help clearing out her dad’s things and brainstorming other options for her life if she decides to close the bar. 

The first sex had gone...okay. He’d had Sam’s metaphorical ghost oversee the whole thing, a look of betrayal on his pouty face. Dean had focused on his aesthetic appreciation for her body (which absolutely exceeds qualifications for the ideal female form) and his desire to deepen their connection. It had gone better than his attempts with strangers because there was trust and an established genuine affection. It just wasn’t what he was hoping. He’d hoped that taking his time to slowly get to know her like he had, that it would be fireworks. Instead, it had been okay.

The second time had been more spontaneous, a shared shower, and much better. He wasn’t as psyched out, and the ghost hadn’t been as insistent, maybe because the damage had already been done. If what he and Willa had done was cheating, then Dean was already a cheater. His favorite part had been afterwards when she’d curled up against him as they drip-dried on the spare bed he’d been using. For a moment, he felt loved. 

The cleaning, his end of the bargain, has been a more arduous process, but he needs something to do after sitting around for the last couple weeks moping about the loss of his eye and healing, a process that always takes too damn long, in his opinion. There are only so many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and Golden Girls that he can watch. He wants to get a move on, get to feeling useful again. He’ll have to re-learn aiming a gun with his shitty depth perception, but the demon hasn’t taken him out of the game for good. He’s just working at a handicap, nothing too bad for Dean Winchester. Hopefully, his sleeping brain will catch on to the fact that Dean’s totally okay with it because the nightmares are a goddamn nuisance.

“How many bags are we up to now?” Willa asks.

“Not as many as we should be at. We’re still putting more in the boxes than the bags.” 

The kitchen is harder for her, he knows. She can still picture his large frame frying something up. Each cracked plastic cup or chipped ceramic plate is a snapshot of her life with her father. Hell, even Dean’s only memory of the man was in a kitchen. They’re gonna be at this room for a while. 

Dean’s cell phone rings from its place on the charger in the family room. “Don’t stop,” he commands, going to answer it. He gets there before the third ring stops. “This is Dean.”

“Dean!” 

“Hey, Chal. How’s it going?” 

“I am in very high spirits,” she says. 

He chuckles. “Oh yeah, why is that?”

“Your father, John, has asked me to marry him.”

The two had been glowing like supercharged fireflies around each other in the hospital and the couple of days they’d visited him at Willa’s, so he’s only surprised that it’s happened so fast, not that it’s happened at all.

“What? You guys are getting hitched?”

Willa must have heard him because she comes in with a bright smile.

“I haven’t answered him yet. He’s waiting right now. I told him I wanted to make sure it was okay with you.” She laughs, a sweet deep-chested thing. “He’s still on one knee.”

She is criminally cute. The joy for her and Dad swells inside of him and he is touched by her offer to include him in the process. “Well, don’t torment him, Chal! Tell him yes!”

“Are you sure? I would try very hard not to be an evil stepmother.”

He’s going to have a stepmother. “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure!” He’s yelling now. “You guys totally have my blessing to get married.”

Willa claps her hands together. 

Dean gets to actually hear her accept his father’s proposal. This is what having a family is like, he thinks. She comes back onto the phone after a protracted break of what he assumes to be kissing. “We’ll wait for the ceremony until we find Sam. I want him there too.”

There’s a pessimistic streak in him then that wasn’t there a year ago, one that wants to suggest she just do it now, or she might never get to have the chance. He’d never in a million years thought it would be so hard for three hunters to find one man, yet here they are, no closer to capturing their runaway than they had been nearly three years ago. Part of him is starting to wonder if finding Sam’s not a when thing but an if thing.

“I’m really happy for you two.”

“I am too!” shouts Willa.

“Willa is too.”

It’s good news, but it tinges the rest of Dean’s day with bittersweet. He wants Sam to know. He remembers the boy’s excitement about that first date, how stubborn he’d been about John treating Chal right, territorial about her heart. The kid back then would have popped with happiness if he’d known that John had gotten down on one knee (stayed on one knee), and did the proposal properly. Of course, that was before Sam had written her off, told Chal he didn’t want to see her again, and then made himself as scarce as an honest politician. Well, Dean’s happy for them, and maybe someday Sam will be too. 

* * *

Lexington, Kentucky - January 2003

Thomas felt Raquel die, a centuries-long song cut abruptly short. He felt Chalendra fall, their angelic connection growing weaker and weaker until it vanished, her grace completely gone. He heard the reasons why, rumors and secrets passing amongst his kind like a virus. The fate of Lucifer the Fallen One’s vessel had been altered. God’s plan had been subverted, corrupted. They were on a timeline their visions could no longer see. Those angels involved in Earth matters, a speck of their sheer numbers, were paralyzed, either by fear of retribution or the unknown. They waited to see what He wanted, but, as had been the case for so long, no answer came; God did not come.

He hears Chalendra’s prayers, powered by ritual in lieu of a soul, and he ignores them like they all do. They come, like clockwork, reminding Thomas of the passage of time, and of his cowardice, each tick a pointed elbow to his side. He’s foolish, swooping down from time to time to observe her; her tears are so unnatural, as is her vessel, but he can see the shape of her in it, the nimble movements and the affectations.

She prays for Sam Winchester, the possibly no-longer future vessel for Lucifer, and his family: Dean Winchester, the brother/lover of Sam Winchester, and John Winchester, the father, who devote their lives to the eradication of evil in a pinhead small portion of the tiny planet on which this drama is playing out. She prays for their guidance and safe-keeping, as all mortals need but these three in a much greater abundance. She calls to her former garrison mates, each by name, including Thomas, though he never sees the others, assumes their fear to be greater than their curiosity. They’re better at writing her off, letting she without grace perish alone in her folly. Thomas watches, here and there, and still dearly loves his sister for her actions despite his best interests. 

She’s made these Winchesters her garrison, loves them each with a love to rival the celestial. She will die, her body breaking down bit by bit, her punishment for such a bastardization of God’s intent, but she will go out with as much love in her heart as she’d entered creation with. He wasn’t aware that they could retain this part of themselves after falling; she’s the first angel he’s known personally to do it. 

He sees the demons take Dean’s eye. He sees Azazel, prince of Hell, sycophant to Lucifer, setting traps for Sam, sending him a gift of power in the guise of a would-be attacker, ripe fruit for the boy king to suck down. All the warding around Sam and his team of poisoned children keeps Thomas from spying directly, but follows their progress anyway, through the same means as the demon. Azazel, it seems, is adapting to the changes in the Plan more easily than his winged nemeses. The angels wait. 

Thomas is done waiting.

Thomas takes a risk.

He opens the journal that John Winchester keeps, a log of all the evil he hunts, and he writes in the angelic script as best he can with the limitations of the human pen. It is not a long message. When he finishes, there is a half a page of Enochian words and two non-Enochian names:  _ Elkins _ and  _ Colt _ .


	6. Failed Tests

Portland, Oregon - May 2003

Natty picks up the scent of a demon around 9th and Greenwood. By this point, they’re practically on top of the damned thing. Max has been dealing with the neck hair prickles, the stomach flips, and the insistent niggle of wrongness for at least a mile, long enough for Sam to wonder if she’ll ever find it, to consider that she may simply be too weak to join with the Azzy Kids. Max doesn’t need to know Sam as freakishly well as he does to see his frustration; it shows in the repeatedly forming clenched fists and the impatiently darting eyes. When Natty stops still and leans her pug nose into the air, like an honest-to-god hunting dog, Sam exhales loudly, relief and irritation expelled like a cloud of negativity into the air.

“I think I found one,” she says.

Max, patience longer than Sam’s these days, assures her that she did. Natty expects more answers, but Max doesn’t let her cheat, just raises his barely visible blond eyebrows in a “well?” expression. Everything they do is practice, a lead up to when they fight the scumbag who robbed them all of their humanity and many of them of parents.

“Okay, I think this way?” 

Every other sentence that Natty speaks is a question, even if it shouldn’t be. She's a midwest valley girl, high voice and pink lipstick. She knows how to birth a cow, knows that Jesus is the reason for her “gift,” and acts like this whole thing is going to end with sunflowers and ponies, like an episode of Care Bears rather than in vengeance and bloodshed. They collected her two months back, but she’s just not a good fit with the others. Sam loathes her; Max is just kind of indifferent.

They follow her denim skirt as she swishes her way down the city streets. Sam’s arms swing broadly at his sides. When they’d first met, Max was always angry, always quick to view any interaction as a sort of conflict, physical or emotional. Now, in the years they’ve spent gathering the army, building their base not once but three times, somehow they’ve switched places. Sam’s like a guitar string all the time, losing patience with the long wait for justice, ready to bite anyone’s head off that makes a mistake. Max often wonders if he’s been a bad influence on Sam, hopes he hasn’t because his own personal growth that he’s been able to make with Sam’s help has been nothing short of miraculous. Compared to how he used to be, Max is a sentient self-help book, a Dalai Lama of calm.

Sam whispers to him, so as to not distract Natty. “It doesn’t seem to be moving. Do you get that impression?” 

Max nods. “Yeah, was thinking that too. I picked it up about maybe ten minutes ago?” He takes in the cross streets, the horizon, though it’s nighttime, and adds, “Always in the SE section?”

“Twenty here, but yeah, something near the industrial district.”

“Did you memorize a map?” 

Sam shrugs, humbly, like it’s no big deal, because he’s used to being a genius, thinks it’s no big deal to just know the layout of a city like he’d grown up here.

The closer that they get to the demon, the more the band in Max’s gut twists. The tension feels like his own, but it isn’t. That’s just how demons work. They make you feel like there is something wrong with you but it’s really them. Max’s family taught him that lesson and he won’t fall for it again in either its human or supernatural execution. 

They approach a medium-sized warehouse, one with half the windows broken and the other half looking like they might shatter just with a glance. The industrial roller door has been spray-painted in places and is kept secure via a large chain and lock. There is a point inside the building that radiates evil, but the building itself only seems like an economic failing, like a section of SimCity that needs a police station or a library, something to turn it vital again.

Natty says, certainly, “It’s in here.”

Sam looks at Max. “You can break that easy, but check first for a second entrance?” He waits for Max’s agreement. It would be so easy for Sam to just give him orders rather than treat him like an equal. Sam is special, and all Azzy’s kids know it. Every time that they recruit a kid with a new power, Sam learns it, acquiring the ability with shocking quickness. If it didn’t sound lame, Max would swear that Sam is the Chosen One. 

Max nods. “Always good to have a second exit.”

“Totally,” adds Natty, completely missing that she hadn’t been part of the decision-making process. Apparently, Sam’s feeling of partnership does not extend to his newest and least-favorite soldier.

A path of broken concrete leads around the warehouse punctuated by an occasional metal pole jutting up two or three feet. Some of the now useless rods have copper links looped through the top. Sam takes point, a task that, as the one being tested, should fall to Natty. Max reminds his friend of this by saying his name after a brief cough. When Sam looks back, Max points a single finger at Natty and tilts his head, one lip raising in amusement. Since Natty doesn’t understand why Sam is suddenly behind her, Sam gives her a little push to keep them moving. 

Before they reach the back doors, one a roller door like the one in front, including the graffiti, and a smaller regular side door, something happens. The sensation, the smell, the essence of demon, leaves. All three stop in their tracks, halted by sudden fresh air, the acrid smell of hell replaced by simple industrial area smell, unpleasant but not dangerous. 

“Damn,” says Sam.

“It’s gone!” Natty laments. 

The three exchange glances. Natty kicks at the ground, sending small stones skittering, and swears. “Okay, well, not surprising considering how long it hung around, right? We just keep looking,” says Max. 

Natty turns around, ready to begin the search anew, but Sam grabs her arm, probably rougher than necessary (Max makes a mental note to talk to him later about how often he manhandles the newer kids). “Wait, we check inside, make sure no one is hurt in there.”  
“Right?” she says; it’s something that she knows but has forgotten in the moment. Newbie mistake.

“Let’s be quick though,” Max suggests. “I think we’ll find something big tonight.”  
Sam’s scrutinizing eye contact makes his heart beat a little faster, even after all this time. “Premonition?”

Max shakes his head. He doesn’t get premonitions, at least, he hasn’t yet. “No, just mindless optimism.”

He deserves the eye roll that Sam gives him. 

The person-sized door next to the large roller door is propped open with a partially destroyed cinder block. Max and Sam’s eyes reach an agreement that this is the simplest, and therefore best way to proceed. “Go ahead,” Sam says to the new recruit.

Natty takes a moment and concentrates, cloaking herself psychically as best she can, before stepping inside the warehouse. With the shrouding, they are visible to the eye but give off no sense of presence. They’re the supernatural version of the busboy who comes around to refill waters, there but not there, appearing only when a glass gets low and then failing to exist between. 

Natty leads the way with a faint LED flashlight. It smells like wood and grease. They enter a small room, bare floor littered with bolts and nails. Cubbies built into the wall might indicate a mailing/shipping room or perhaps an employee break room. Past that, Natty leads them down a corridor. She looks to Sam for guidance when they come to a side door and he waves her on. Probably an office of some sort, but it’s unlikely to lead to the main manufacturing floor where the evil presence had been. It’s impossible to tell by what they’ve seen so far what this building was used to manufacture, but Max is guessing at least five years have passed since anyone with a respectable purpose stood inside it.

Again they come to a propped open door, this time the prop is an impressively metal thermos - the kind that construction workers use. Seeing it, Max feels the urge to touch it to see if it actually has hot coffee inside. It’s not like finding that out will tell him anything more than its mere presence does. Natty doesn’t hesitate as she did before but quietly pulls back the door, her hand twitching around the gun at her side like a nervous spaghetti western character. Max follows, with Sam bringing up the rear. 

They’re onto the manufacturing floor proper, shielded from seeing the full layout, and shielded from other eyes, by a wall of particleboard. Somehow, incredibly, the corridor had provided enough insulation that they couldn’t hear the crying until now. It’s a child, or at least, it sounds like one, and it energizes Max’s nerves. He can feel, through his psychic powers, the reaction that Sam has behind him. No matter his newfound level of grumpiness, Sam has always and will always be the protector of anyone who needs it. A kid crying has made this more than routine, finally caught his interest.

They wait, tensely, as Natty peers around the slab of cheap brown material. She can’t use telepathy while cloaking herself, so she holds up two fingers and mouths “men” at them, then, a single pointer finger and “child.” 

Max, unable to help his own curiosity, leans over her shoulder and peers at the heart of the factory floor. A circle of light generated by a battery-powered lantern illuminates the scene: two men, one crouched in front of a girl in a chair, and one rummaging through a bag. The combination of distance, they’re a good fifty feet away, bad angle, and poor lighting makes it hard to adequately gauge the situation, but Max also has the added benefit of knowing that a short while ago there was a demon here. His telepathy is stronger than Natty and, though it’s tricky to do so, he sends a thought to Sam. It’s a bit like juggling with one hand while writing a letter with the other. “I think they’re exorcists. It could be a kidnapping, but weird timing, right?”

Sam nods. It’d be even harder, might not even be possible to hear a response back from Sam while keeping up mental shields. Maybe someday down the road, they’ll figure out how to only allow in certain people. Heck, at this point, Max could probably pick up just about anything of Sam’s, thoughts, feelings, presence, as well as his own. They have a different feel to them than anyone else. They’re tagged with an overarching sense of Sam-ness. At this juncture though, the nod will have to suffice as proof that they’re in agreement that these men are probably performing an exorcism on a kid. That the kid is crying at least means that she lived through it and that these guys must know what they’re doing well enough to have banished a demon. They are all on the same side.

“Natty,” says Sam, catching her attention. He then juts his chin forward, encouraging her to step forward, to reveal herself. She does so with more confidence than Max would, more than he does, once it’s his turn to pass onto the widest part of clear space on the factory floor. 

The first man, the one consoling the child, is a dark-skinned man of probably fifty-five years. His short hair starts far back from his forehead and his goatee is more grey than black. He looks angry, defensive, and with good reason since the three of them have just wandered into this scenario. “Hey, who are you?” he asks, rising up to as tall as he can make himself. 

“Demon hunters,” says Sam, even though the question had been directed at Natty. He takes small, non-threatening steps towards the circle of light. “We followed one here, but it’s gone now, right?”

The second hunter stands up then from where he’s been fiddling with a giant black duffel bag, back to the three of them. When he turns, he has a gun in his hand and a smirk on his face. “Guess, I won’t have to use this then.” It’s an odd threat coming from someone with a priest’s collar, but Max should be accustomed by now to the unexpected. The man looks exhausted, skin pale and blotchy with chapped lips and bloodshot eyes. Max immediately distrusts him, sees something of the same look in the man’s face as he did his father’s. “Yeah, it’s gone.”

“What are you kids doing hunting demons?” asks the older hunter, the one who isn’t posing as or isn’t genuinely a priest. “Shouldn’t ya’ll be in school?”

Natty looks anxiously between the men and Sam, waiting for him to smooth over the situation. She’s failing. No Azzy Kid has failed before. Max has an instant and deeply disturbing image in his mind of Sam shooting her in the back of the head. It doesn’t feel as unlikely as it should, not with how obsessed Sam is to make them the best, to get vengeance on the yellow-eyed demon. Max won’t let him, if it comes to that, no matter how smitten he may be, he won’t let this half-witted cowgirl come to any harm if Sam deems her incapable of staying at the camp.

“How did you find the demon?” asks Sam. It’s a good question. Unlike what they do to the demons, exorcisms just relocate them. They can keep tabs on the demon’s haunts, make sure it doesn’t come right back. They can kill what these guys can only temporarily evict.

The hunters exchange glances. “Go on, kid. You don’t want to get messed up in this.” The first hunter picks up the crying girl, strokes her hair. “Besides, we’ve got to get this girl back home.”

The priest looks too weak to hold even a girl of her size, probably worn out from the effort of the exorcism. He moves slowly, packing up their equipment - ropes, holy water, potions, and more. They’re carrying on now, as though the three of them haven’t just busted in on their rescue. They’d been too late to help because of Natty. She’d taken too long to scent the demon. At least, in this case, the victim will be okay, physically at least. She’s alive and healthy, just scared. But, in the future, that weakness of basic demon sensing ability could be a liability that costs a life. Max realizes that Natty isn’t just failing, but she’s failed. 

“I understand why you need to go,” says Sam as though talking down a jumper. “It would just be helpful to us if you tell us what tipped you off.”

Hunter one shakes his head. “No doing kid, just go back to riding your skateboard and leave the hunting to the pros.” 

Max waits for Sam to react, but instead, he stands there, watching the two pack up and leave, poor recently possessed girl in tow. He can’t see Sam’s face, but he knows what it looks like, knows well enough by now the tightened jaw, the slitted eyelids of his anger. Eventually, he steps forward and places a hand on the center of Sam’s upper back. 

“She’s out,” whispers Sam.

“I know,” responds Max. “We’ll find more.”

* * *

She’s been crying, not in the loud exaggerated manner that she does everything else, but silently, eyes watching the landscape pass by the car window. She’s not even trying to beg her way out of this exile. Sam’s glad of that. He’s already positively thrumming with rage. He shouldn’t be. It’s not her fault. Her powers are so much weaker than anyone else they’ve ever found and he’d been able to tell that right away. This is on him, a minor waste of time, effort, and resources to recruit and train her. They should’ve left her in the dark, let her get eaten up by Azazel, or whatever it is he does with the ones that they haven’t been able to find. Now, the burden of her falls to him. She knows their plans and the location of the camp. Essentially, though the phrase has melodramatic connotation, Natty knows too much. Azazel may know that they’re out here, but it’s not going to tell the local authorities or tout on the news about their little militia. 

Every moment, from first approaching her at the checkout of Wegman’s to watching in dismay as she couldn’t lift a ping pong ball with her mind to today when she could have cost a possessed little girl her life, it is all Sam’s fault because he’s the leader, he’d chosen her and invited her prematurely into the fold. How did he get to this point? But then, he’d never had a normal life, had he? He’s been killing evil things since he was old enough to hold the angel’s blade. He just never expected to become the evil that needed hunting. Well, after they take out the YED, he’ll happily take as many rounds of lead to the head as any hunter wants.

They’re getting close to Portland now and unless he wants witnesses, he needs to make his move. He takes the next exit off the freeway.

It takes several minutes longer than he could have hoped for before Natty notices the path deviation, distracted probably by her deep sadness. “Where are we going?” she asks.

He could offer a lie, “Taking a shortcut,” but what’s the point? She’s not going to be alive much longer. He can feel her eyes on him, trying to understand what he’s doing, sizing up his intentions, instincts more powerful than her stupidity. “Sam, what… where are you taking me?” He grips tighter onto the steering wheel, anticipating that she will lash out physically. He needs to find an isolated spot soon before she does. Her volume increases and the worry in that volume increases, turns to panic. “Where are we? Why won’t you answer me?”

A dirty road, lucky for him, unlucky for her. He pulls off. The truck isn't new, doesn’t have automatic locks, but Sam doesn’t need that. Before the vehicle comes to a complete stop, he mentally locks the doors. 

Natty freaks out. “You’re gonna kill me?” she screams. It’s always questions with her and even now, seconds before her death, when she deserves the most sympathy possible, it still pisses him off. Her hands grab the door handle, then the little knob of the locking mechanism. Holding it still is easier than clenching a fist, despite how hard she’s pulling. She turns to him, and the look of fear on her round innocent face nearly kills him.

When he’d killed Ava, before, it had been self-defense of a sort. Oh, it had still been fucked up and evil, but she’d attacked first, she’d already been approached, seduced by Azazel. She’d already decided to go dark side before Sam ever entered the picture. She’d summoned forces, lesser demons, Pitbulls of the underworld, and he’d had to kill her to stop her. What he’d done to land the final blow was what made it reprehensible, and is how he plans to kill this girl. Natty isn’t attacking him, might not ever rat them out, might be seen as inconsequential enough not even to be approached by the demon at all. But he can’t take that risk. She’s more dangerous because of what she knows, not what she can do. Sam intends to learn from this, but it’s as soothing as a mother’s kiss on a decapitated child. 

He closes his eyes, leaving himself vulnerable to attack, but if he can’t handle a hundred-pound girl with all his training and powers then he doesn’t deserve to lead the Azzy Kids. He searches within her, looks for the rot that came with the demon blood. It had been there in Ava, had been a twisting kudzu of evil, infesting around her bones and muscles. In Natty, it’s smaller, less spread out, more like an outbreak of acne, leaving little pockmarks in its wake. He senses his way around it, tries to stay focused as she cries out, feels whatever it is that he’s doing. “What are you doing to me? Please don’t kill me!” All the things that every victim of a serial killer has said before, he imagines. Isn’t that what this will make him, murdering a teenage girl in cold blood? 

He’s pulling on the black mass with invisible hands, extracting it from where it’s been nestled for 20 years. It doesn’t come easily, but there’s less of it to gather, fewer vile tendrils to resist him, so it takes less effort than it had Ava. Perhaps one of the other kids will do this to him, when the time comes, when the demon gets obliterated from existence, when their mothers’ deaths are avenged, and they’ve harmed only those who truly deserved it, not like him. They’ll be able to rest their consciences because they’ve never scraped out the power, vampire-sucked it right from the fucking marrow of a terrified, blameless girl. 

It gives, finally, each little sprout and tentacle, and he absorbs it deep into his chest, stacks it next to Ava’s, next to his. It feels gross inside him, like food poisoning, like guilt, like hate. He opens his eyes, can’t see because of the tears that have soaked his eyes, his cheeks, leaving trails down his shirt. He wipes at the moisture, trying to clear his vision. What he sees is another horror, one more to add to the pile. Natty’s body is limp, eyes closed, head back against the glass of the passenger side window. Her hands are together, fingers interlaced, as though she’s praying, or, more likely, begging for mercy. 

“No!” he cries out, as though he hadn’t been the one to kill her, because he can’t handle how she looks there. He grabs her body, shakes her. “No!” He puts his fingers to her neck, feeling for a pulse. 

He finds one.

Fast as lightning, he’s pulling the truck back onto the road. His vision is still blocked by tears, his hands doing nothing to stem the tide of them falling from his eyes. As long as he can make out the borders of lanes, he’s good, but he can’t stop himself from taking peeks at Natty, and that might end up being more dangerous. He’s changed his mind. He can’t just accept being evil. Ava  _ had _ been different. He’d thought that he was kidding himself about the self-defense thing but down in his core, he must really have believed it, because right now, if he had to choose between Natty being okay and Azazel being dead, he doesn’t honestly know which one he’d pick. 

The next blue H symbol comes up on an exit sign sooner than he’d expected and hope fills him when he somehow manages to spot it. His hands tremble and he shouts at each light, each stop sign, but there’s too much traffic to just charge through without respecting the driving laws. At a long red, he leans over, feels at her neck again. He’s got so much adrenaline pumping through him that it takes him forever to find the pulse, has him thinking for a few seconds that he’s missed his opportunity, but his fingers finally feel that beat beneath their own trembling, and he could weep from relief. 

It should be impossible to be more scared than he already is, but when he sees the hospital, stern and professional, down the road, he does indeed swallow down his terror. If he drops her off and they fix her, what will she tell them? She owes them no allegiance, not now that he’s stripped her of her powers and tried to kill her. It matters, because those seven lives at the camp and the four other kids who allied themselves but refused to live on-site, are counting on him to keep them safe. 

He pulls in front of the emergency room and immediately jumps out to her side, pulls her lifeless body from the truck. “I need help!” he cries out. “Please, someone!”

She’s light, but he sets her down, right there on the ground, because he’s going to have to run. When someone in scrubs comes out, face determined, he runs back around to the driver’s side and hops back in. He hadn’t turned off the engine, so it’s just a matter of getting back into gear. He hears yelling, questions, and demands to stop, but he ignores these, his heart beating louder than their words as he drives off. In the rearview mirror, he sees people gathering around Natty. It’s both relieving and stressful, because this is going to have consequences. They’ll have to pack up camp again.

After forty-five minutes of driving, he pulls off, somewhere isolated and cries. It’s been a while since he cried for Dean, but he cries for Dean and the lost life he’d had. He cries for a mother that he never knew and a mother who never actually was his mother. He cries because of how close he’s come to losing his humanity. 

* * *

Columbia Gorge, Oregon - May 2003

Sam needs to hear someone else’s voice, wants to just listen to mindless chatter on the lips of someone who cares about him. He calls Traci from a rest stop along interstate 84, only 15 minutes from camp, dialing in the numbers manually because he doesn’t trust his disposable phone with so precious a contact.

“Sam!” Immediately, the voice makes him feel better. Traci cares about him, even if that’s only because she doesn’t know how bad it’s gotten, how far down the rabbit hole he’s gone. He can hear the happiness and the affection in her voice.

“I told you not to add these numbers to your phone,” he chides immediately, unable to turn off his leader mentality even for a second. 

“Yeah, I always take orders from pipsqueak teenagers.”

“I’m twenty, Traci, no longer a teenager.” He watches the cars go by absent-mindedly.

“Well, fuck, you’re practically a senior citizen now. Got AARP yet?”

“How are you?”

Open-ended questions are a guarantee for self-absorbed monologues from her. True to form, she fills him in on everything that’s happened since the last time he called her six weeks earlier. He’s proud of her. She may have returned home after trying so long to make her acting career a success, but she didn’t do so on her hands and knees. She’s still living life on her terms, teaching acting to the local denizens of Chesapeake Bay, breaking hearts of men not garish enough to keep her attention, and probably offending random strangers with her gratuitous use of profanity and under-utilization of clothing. It seems that lately, she’s also been taking salsa lessons and is fostering a two-legged Pitbull.

“She’s a sweet old gal. Not as good as Dotty.” 

Sam shakes his head. “I don’t think you’ll ever find another one as good as Dotty.”

“Cancer can straight up fuck itself. I miss that dumb bitch. Miss you too, while I’m at it. When do I get to come and check out the new camp? What are you calling this one?”

“Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome.” He hopes that Traci can hear how he feels about that name since she can’t see him roll his eyes over the phone. 

She laughs anyway. “Electric Boogaloo was better. Maybe I just like that one cause it’s the only one I’ve gotten to visit.”

He knows she’s angling. They’re not ready yet though for her to visit. He’s really been hoping to fill out their ranks now that they’re working as an effective supernatural army. It’s stupid to think about showing off for her, but he’s really been hoping that by the time she comes to see the third camp location, that they’ll be preparing for the final showdown. Of course, one of the reasons why that’s important to him is that he thinks it might be the last time he ever sees her. Their success isn’t guaranteed. His life isn’t guaranteed either and he’d rather die taking that bastard out than to run away. “We’re not ready yet. Maybe fall, or next spring.”

“Ugh!” she says. “That’s forever away!”

“Now who’s being childish?” he teases.

“Me! I’m being a big baby cause I want to see my long-haired hero protector man! It’s still long right? Cause you know that I’m dropping you as my bestie if you cut it!”

Traci might be the only person currently in his life whom he cannot predict. He’s lived alongside Max too long, sharing psychic thoughts, and he’s gotten to know the other Azzy kids well enough to anticipate who will fight his order, who will complain about training, who will rally the others when they feel discouraged. If there’s one thing that Chal taught him, it’s how to condition these guys into hunters. That, and never place too much trust in anyone.

“You cold-hearted Delilah!” 

“Seriously, how fucked up is it that my best friend is someone ten years younger than me?” she lies. 

“Ten, huh?”

“You shut your whore mouth!” Her deep voice adds more severity to it than he knows she intends. She has mean bones in her body, he’s seen them in action, but this is just friendly teasing for her.

“I should probably get back up to camp.”

“You sound down,” she says.

If she knew the things he’d done, the things he would do in order to ensure their victory over the demon, she wouldn’t care that he was down. He’d crossed that line, the imaginary border between right and wrong, a year ago, and there was no going back after that. But, she doesn’t know. She has faith in him that he’s a good person. He has faith that everything he’s doing will stop at least one evil being from harming others. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, at least he’s in for a smooth ride.

“It’s not easy, what we’re working towards,” he offers vaguely.

“I know. You work really hard out there. Well, don’t forget to sniff the roses a bit too, Sam. Maybe a blonde one, with a heart of gold and a serious case of the tragic backstory?” 

Sam shakes his head. She would be right, might be right, if they succeed, but he has to stay focused. He doesn’t have time to lose sight of his goals. Plus, there’s always… Dean. Dean, the embodiment of all that used to be good in his world, lurks in the edges of his mind, does jumping jacks right behind his eyes when he sleeps and infiltrates his dreams with memories and impossible futures. “I can’t, for so many reasons.”

“Think about it. Once you guys kill it. He’s in love with you, you know.”

Oh sure, Max likes him, has a crush that doesn’t seem to go away, but that doesn’t mean he loves him, and he definitely never will if it comes to light that Natty never found her way back home. Still, thinking about what comes after is not anything Sam wants to do. A large part of him intends to not survive that final conflict, if he can manage it after Azazel’s death. The way he imagines it, when he daydreams by himself on the cot in his ramshackle hut, he kills Azazel, makes sure that he snuffs out every last bit of the fucker’s lifeforce, and then, allows any remaining minions to take him out. They swarm around him, noncorporeal black smoke creatures covering him, seeping into his eyes and mouth and brain. He can’t think of a more fitting death than to be erased from existence like that, buried beneath evil.

He doesn’t argue with her assessment, but she picks up on it anyway. “Trust me. I’m an expert at love.” 

It’d be too cruel to point out that she’s never had a man longer than a year. “I think your radar might be off on this one.”

“And, if I’m not? He’s good for you.”

“I’m beyond redemption,” he says, thinking of Natty and Ava, unconscious and drained of power and thinking of his brother, blood leaking from his neck and precum from his cock. The taint is too dark, the stain overflowing into everyone around him. 

“I know you think that,” she says, voice more serious than she usually allows it to be. Traci hates talking about important shit, prefers the world to be a dream of her own making. He wishes he had that ability, to just see what he wanted to see, to block out the bad. “Dean’s a survivor too. If he’s anything like you, and I bet he is, then he’s doing just fine.”

The name slices, as it always does, across his heart. Sometimes he wishes he’d never told Traci the truth. “It’s not just… him.”

“Then stop being an asshole. It’s not that fucking hard.”

“Too late,” he says. 

“I’m coming out in spring and if you haven’t fucked a Sam’s dick-sized hole in Max by then, I’m going to kick your ass. Oh, and stop being such a goddamn Eeyore. Fucking teenagers, man. Everything is the goddamn apocalypse with you shitheads.”

He smiles, at the vulgarity, at the intent. “I’m 20 now,” he repeats. “Not a teenager.”

Traci screams in overdramatic frustration. It’s good to have this solace, even if he doesn’t deserve it. 

* * *

Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - May 2003

By the time that Sam gets back to camp, the sun has risen. He parks the truck in the leaf-covered makeshift garage next to the only other vehicle they keep. In the darkness and the quiet, he breathes, feeling as though he’s been up not for just 24 hours, but a lifetime. His bones actually feel old as he steps out of the truck. He’d spent some of the night renting a storage unit for Natty’s bags. He could have just thrown them in a dumpster, but if she somehow survives what he’d done to her, then he wants to have the option, at least, to get her back her belongings. The rest of the night was driving and crying, feeling like he wants to tear out his own eyes in penance for what he’s done and wishing he just plain old didn’t know anything about the demon blood, or demons, or any of it.

The last time he felt this weary was the night he’d run away, when Traci had taken mercy on him, allowed him to vent in her hotel room, and he’d cried out every last drop of water his eyes could produce while she held him and he’d confessed to her, this complete stranger, that he’d found out his lover was his brother. She hadn’t stuck him back outside, hadn’t called a mental facility when he started rambling about things like demons, or done anything she should have. She’d just listened and petted him until he’d been too tired to move. It should have been impossible to open up after what he’d just gone through, but he was young and heartbroken, and he didn’t expect to ever see her again anyway. But when he’d woken up the next morning (by pure luck the room had been a double twin), she’d encouraged him to hop back in the car with her to continue on all the way to New England. If it hadn’t been for her kindness, he might have been lost long before tonight. 

He startles to see Max standing there in the archway formed by the rune-etched metal siding. He grabs at his heart, worried for a nanosecond that Azazel has found them. “Max,” he identifies. 

When Max doesn’t sleep, his eyes become beacons of red. They’re probably not unlike his own right now, after so many hours of tears. He’s grown a goatee in the recent months which suits his face, camouflages his natural deathly pallor. His hair is shorter too, so it doesn’t fly away from his head like Doc Brown in Back to the Future when they train. He’s wrapped in two hoodies, one zipped and one open. It looks comfortable. Max’s presence is comfortable. He relies so much upon his silent strength and the soothing reminders that pop up in his head when he’s overreacting. 

“How did it go?” Max asks.

Sam can feel a light pressure in his head, the feeling of a gentle mental probing. It’s not uncommon for them to do around each other, but at the moment, it feels invasive, probably because of his guilt. He pushes back a bit, not allowing the inquiry. “I fucked up by picking her.”

Max shrugs. “You didn’t know.”

The conversation that he’d had with Traci flits through his mind, briefly, just a flirtation with the idea that maybe Max does love him, but the moment passes quickly because he knows that he’s no good for anybody, least of all someone with a ‘heart of gold.’ “We’ve got to find a way to test them first, before we bring them here.” He gestures around the garage. Then, he shakes his head. “We’ve got to move again.”

“Yeah, I already told the others that we’ll need to pack up by Sunday.”

Sam smiles. This is why he trusts Max as a partner. He’s good at thinking ahead, strategizing. Sometimes it feels like they were cut from the same cloth, only his side is the one with the thread imperfections. “Thanks, man.” He pats Max’s shoulder as he passes by into the early morning air. Since they’ve been running the camp, time in the city doesn’t feel as good as it used to. He’s always eager to get back to where the birds let you know when it’s time to get up, rather than being jolted up by a trash truck. 

“Sam?”

They’re close together, Max with his arms wrapped around himself looking about as worried as a dad waiting for his daughter to get back from prom. “What is it?”

The blue in Max’s eyes looks more like grey in the mornings. Like he’s taken bits of the pre-dawn into himself to make way for the sun. Traci’s in his head again. So, actually, is Max, but in a more tangible way, gently pushing again to feel Sam’s mood. Sam can tell that’s all he’s going for, not actual thought-scanning but just picking up on vibes. Rather than resist, he permits it, only because he’s confident in his ability to hide the depths of his guilt and despair. Ava’s murder had made something like that effortless.

“Natty is... alive, right?” It hurts and that probably shows up on his face and through the connection, because Max adds more, quickly. “I know that she knows a lot. She knows what we’re up to out here, she knows where we’re at. It would be… if we didn’t have any morals, if we were talking just smart moves, it’d be best to kill her.” He places a hand on Sam’s, either as a show of support or as a deepening of the psychic connection, Sam can’t be sure which. “Just, I need to know that you didn’t kill her.”

Sam forces his jaw to unclench, tries to swallow down anger. His head still screams, ‘How could he think I’d do that?’ even while he knows goddamn well that he did try to do just that. “No.”

“No…?”

“Goddammit Max, I didn’t kill her!” he says sharply, anger popping through. Max doesn’t release his hand, though, and now Sam’s got a pretty good idea that it is so that he can tell if he’s lying. But, he isn’t lying about this, even if there are worlds of details to the answer that could be added to make it truer. He looks into Max’s eyes, hopes that by staring straight back, he can send the message that he’s telling the truth and, also, that he resents having to say it.

Max takes his hand back and nods. “Thank you.”

In a huff, Sam walks off, heading back to his pathetic excuse for a cabin and leaving Max to probably feel guilty about having asked. 

* * *

Singer Salvage Yard, South Dakota - 2003

It surprises Bobby that more hunters don’t pull the kind of crap he’s been doing, setting up a base of operations that serves as an information hub, rather than going out and risking life, limb, and sanity fighting the things that go bump in the night. Oh, he knows a few hunters that do it, but it’s mostly those who are ‘retired,’ which is a fancy way of saying too damn old. He knows that what he does is useful, but there’s something about not being part of the ground forces (at least not very often) that makes him feel like he’s getting away with something. Like when he gets a call from Rufus, who is definitely in that “retired” range since he’s the same age as Bobby. But, Rufus is going to retire soon, at least that’s what he says over and over, more convincingly after those times when he barely escapes with his bones on the inside of his body.

“Hey, you bastard.”

“What do you want?”

Anyone eavesdropping to the phone call would think they were enemies, and honestly, sometimes they are. “Wanted to fill you in on a demon in Portland, Oregon.”

Another report of demons. Like a character on one of those cookie-cutter crime dramas, Bobby turns around to the map of the US he has behind his swivel chair. He grabs a post-it note, these ones are really small, so they don’t cover half the damn state, but they also don’t leave much room for his fat fingers to write out the issue. “Demon,” he writes. Then, below that, the month and year. “Go ahead,” he says, ready to take in the details. Essentially his whole life right now is a game of telephone, only people die if he gets shit wrong. 

“A little girl got possessed at a catholic school. Friend of mine, a priest named Loren Strong, he works there, saw that she was trying to get the kids to sell their souls.”

Bobby frowns. “Is the girl okay?”

“Nearly broke Loren. Happened yesterday, and he’s been sleeping since we brought her back, but yeah, he got the thing out of her.” Rufus is quiet long enough to make Bobby wonder if that’s all there is to the call, but then he speaks up, “It’s happening a lot these days, isn’t it?”

Bobby nods, scanning over the map. “Yeah, these demons are popping up all over the place. Doesn’t seem like good news, does it?”

“Used to be that you could follow up on ten reports of possession and not find one real one. Now, I’ve got to where I just assume that it’s demons.” 

“Landry came across one in South Carolina last week; only, his victim didn’t have as happy of an ending.” 

It’s something that hunters talk about a lot these days, the growing trend of demonic possessions. It doesn’t exactly fill Bobby with the warm fuzzies. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of him. If there’s one thing that the world doesn’t need to see an uptick in, it’s demons. 

“There were even some teenagers that showed up! Called themselves demon hunters. Not sure how bad it’s gotten that even kids are noticing.”

“Teenagers?”

“Yeah, two boys and a girl. They wanted to know where we’d found the demon like they wanted to see if they could bag themselves one.”

Bobby’s got one of those little ripples of intuition, as dear to a hunter as any weapon. “Was one of the boys about six-and-a-half feet tall, on the skinny side, probably with long brown hair?” For anyone else, he’d have to find his notes to come up with that description, but he’s asking for one of the best hunters and one of his personal closest friends. “John Winchester’s got a description of his kid that got snatched from the crib.”

“Then, you should let John know that we’ve got a match around Portland, Oregon, cause that’s what the leader of the group looked like.”

“I’ll send you a picture of the kid to confirm,” says Bobby, but he’s pretty sure that it’s a positive identification already, knowing the accuracy of the ripple. John’s gonna lose his mind, not that there’s much there to lose. The man’s been obsessed with the death of his wife, which Bobby gets since he didn’t handle his own wife’s death so great himself, and with finding his abducted baby. You could have knocked Bobby over with a feather when it turned out that John’s boy was alive! He wishes that was the case for the loved ones of so many hunters. Instead, it’s just them holding on without a prayer. John’s kid has been hunting demons, is really good at it, from what John says. Bobby might not have believed him, might have thought that the wishful thinking was overriding his common sense, but John’s girlfriend was the one that raised the kid. The one time he’d met her, she’d been pretty tight-lipped about the details, but Bobby’s not one to stick his nose where it don’t belong. Except spotting a potential sighting of the kid, like he was now, that is his business, and he needs to give John a heads up on this while the trail is still hot. He hopes, a bit jealously, that it works out. They’d seemed like a cute couple and then you add in Dean and the new boy, and they might just be able to have the perfect family, demon-free.

* * *

Greenleaf, Idaho - May 2003

When the gun goes off inside the Gas N’ Sip, Chalendra is refueling the Sierra Grande, hand holding the pump trigger rather than using the little catch that automates the process. The loud bang is incongruous with the setting, large empty lot impressively lit to keep away the unfathomable dark that seems to only form around fields, this time fields of corn, at night. She startles a bit, but it’s only seconds before she’s abandoned the pump and grabbed her own gun, a well-loved Springfield Armory XD, out of the pocket panel of the passenger-side door.

She approaches the store quickly, but warily, angelic training overriding the urge to just run in, panicked and desperate, to protect the love of her life. Giant signs advertising plump hot dogs and two for two dollars candies obstruct her view inside. It isn’t until she is actually standing at the door, gun held discreetly behind her hip and eyes peering between no shirt, no service warnings and a schedule of open hours, that she gets a sense of the situation. She pulls the door open.

John is crouched on the white and beige checkered tile floor and at the sound of the pleasant door chime, he looks up from the man he has in a chokehold, and, seeing that it’s her, smiles, broad and sheepish, making her heart skip a beat as he has a tendency to make it do. “Sorry,” says John. “I’m almost done here.”

The portion of the attempted robber’s face that shows from where his clichéd ski mask is pushed up is reddish-purple. His hands, an ivory white with some blush pink around the knuckles, clutch around John’s arms, trucker’s tan brown and covered in dark hairs. The fired gun rests against the rubber mat with its large dirt-catching hexagons just beneath her feet. The station attendant has come around to the front of the counter in order to watch, perhaps participate in, the robber’s capture, but now his excitement-filled eyes are turned on her. His name badge reads “Raoul.”

“He needs to breathe,” Chal reminds her sometimes overly enthusiastic Winchester. John immediately eases off his compression and the criminal gulps in air, stammers and swears. “I’ll fetch restraints,” she offers.

“Thanks, Love,” John calls to her as she pushes the door open to return to the truck.

She chooses the zip ties, reasoning that whatever they leave on the robber’s wrists they won’t be getting back, and while money for handcuffs isn’t a problem, the time and effort it takes to etch devil’s traps into them is. Before heading back inside, she hangs the pump handle up and re-caps the tank, preparing the vehicle for the quick getaway they’ll need to make if the attendant pressed any silent alarms. They may not be on the run from the cops, but they don’t really want to draw attention to themselves as vigilantes either. It’s in their best interests as hunters to stay as off the police radar as possible.

Raoul has no compunctions about delaying his phone call to the cops until they’ve gone; the way his eyes radiate worship as he listens to John give orders, Chal thinks it’s lucky they’re not asking for more. It’s almost as though he’s in a thrall. She’s noticed that when John uses his authoritative voice, as he is now, few question him. He conveys to them that it’s in their best interest, and usually, it is, to obey whatever command he’s giving. Chal likes that voice, but then, she likes them all, just plain old likes him.

The denim around the thief’s ankles is frayed, making it easy for her to get direct skin contact with the ties; the pain will be more acute should he attempt to break them by spreading his legs.

“I’ll need to take your security tape,” John says to Raoul.

She frowns. “Evidence, Love,” she reminds him, completing the trio of ties on the thief’s ankles. When the man gets taken to court, the humans will need proof, and video evidence is better than this lone attendant’s account.

“Not our problem,” he mumbles.

When she reaches for the thief’s wrists, he lurches and grabs her shirt, gripping the cotton with furious fear and a pale white hand. She yells at the same time that the man makes a choking sound, John’s formidable strength exerting itself on the thief’s windpipe. “Hey!” John yells. “Get your fucking hand off her.” The thief obeys, but probably only to try and slap at John’s arm again, claw at it. She can see the marks he’s already left in John’s arm, rows of blood thicker at the top, like commas. “Try that again…” he growls. “They won’t need to bother taking you to jail.”

Without hesitation, she reaches again for the man’s wrist, and this time he only looks at her with wide frightened eyes partially obscured by the thick black cloth of the ski mask. His teeth grind together and he hisses like she’s hurting him or like he’s doing some snake impression. She yanks hard on the first zip tie, exacting some vengeance for frightening her. She begins to hum while jerking on the other two.

“Is that Blue Oyster Cult?” asks John. He’s amused.

She smiles, pushing her bangs behind her ear. “It was on the radio this morning when the alarm went off.”

“I remember,” John says. “It’s just… well, it’s good, to hear you singing it.”

Raoul comes up then jiggling a VHS tape in his hands. “The tape. I got it.”

“Good!” says John, rising to his feet. The thief falls to the dirty floor without the support of John’s arms. Tied up as he is, the thief’s only choice is to lie like a worm, even squirms like one, desperate to escape his current situation. She could almost admire his tenacity if his self-preservation didn’t directly conflict with theirs. “Don’t touch the gun,” John advises Raoul. “His prints are all over it.”

“Unless he manages to break through the ties,” Chal adds. “Then aim for the head.”

After taking the tape from the attendant, John checks the scratches on his arm. “Good thing I’m up on my Tetanus,” he mutters.

“We’ll clean them up back at the hotel,” she assuages. “I’m going to finish pumping the gas.” On her way out, she can’t help but notice the display of sodas, Coca-Cola Classics, piled in a stand shaped like a Coca-Cola Classic bottle. It makes her notice how dry her mouth is, most likely a symptom of the adrenaline finally leaving her. “Honey, would you purchase a blue Gatorade for me?”

“Oh!” says Raoul. “You can have that on the house! Any items you might need!”

John shakes his head, uncomfortable with praise from those he’s rescued. “I’ll buy it,” he tells her.

Chal can hear Cujo’s whine from inside the Sierra Grande’s shell. She had completely forgotten about the waheela in the commotion. She claps her hand to the side of the vehicle and sternly says, “None of that, now.” Her voice quiets the beast more than the command, lets her know that her master is nearby and in one piece.

The tank was already nearly full when she’d been interrupted. She’s back in the vehicle, gun returned to its place in the door pocket hidden from passing eyes beneath a thick a newspaper, and Waheela muzzle jutting from the truck’s back window to rest sweetly on her shoulder, by the time John opens up the driver’s side door, large brown bag crinkling in his strong hands. “Guy kept wanting to give me shit,” he complains.

He climbs in, pecks her on the lips. “But, I did accept some lottery scratchers.” He holds up a long strip of paper rectangles and grins at her.

She reaches out and takes them. “I’ve never participated in a lottery. It is thought of as foolish, right? A low-probability game that those who can’t afford to play, do.” She notes the different texture of little boxes on each rectangle, a dirty patch. When she rubs a bit, blackness comes off on her thumb and reveals a number beneath. “Numerical clues!” she exclaims. “Does it give coordinates?”

She must really have been off the mark with her guess because he laughs that rare way he sometimes does, where his upper lip vanishes almost entirely, obscured by the top row of his teeth, and his neck curls down like he’s trying to find a spot on his shirt. She smiles as he laughs, waits for his explanation while enjoying his pleasure.

Finally, he rests his hand on her knee. “No, babe. People aren’t smart enough for that.” He strokes her thigh a bit before removing the warm, skilled fingers and rooting around in his shirt pocket. “Usually you just try and match the numbers; there’s directions on the back.”

She reads the instructions while he pulls the truck onto the highway and fiddles with his phone. She’s disappointed to find that there is no skill involved, merely luck, her least favorite kind of game. “This doesn’t seem like much fun.”

“It only is if you win,” he says, placing the phone to his ear. “It rang while I was dealing with that idiot.” She doesn’t know whether John is referring to the thief or the attendant. “Missed a call from Bobby.”

“May I expose the lottery numbers?” she asks.

He presses a button on his phone, going to voicemail most likely. He nods at her, but his eyes are on the road. “Sure, Love, but try using a coin instead of your nail.”

There are many coins piled in the tray between the cup holders and some on the floor around the seats. John is good about having a place for everything, even if objects don’t necessarily always end up there. From the stack, she grabs a nickel. She isn’t certain whether the type of coin matters, but she doesn’t want to interrupt the voicemail to which he’s listening in order to ask. Scraping the black stuff off the paper is pleasant, like getting the first layer of ice off the windshield or sanding down dirty wood.

She uncovers two sixes, two forties, a twenty-two, and a little icon of a bee. This would add to the “honeypot” if she had a match, which she doesn’t.

“Chalendra,” says John.

At his use of her full name, her hands freeze and her pulse picks up.

John’s eyes should be on the road, but they’re not, they’re watching her, waiting for her to look up. She does, can see what he’s about to say before he speaks.

“We’ve got a lead on Sam.”


	7. Reunion

Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - May 2003

When Sam puts off relocating the camp two whole weeks, Max is suspicious. The other Kids, of course, are happy about the delay and don't question it. He tells Max that he isn't sure that their pre-scouted spot is a good one. This isn’t entirely a lie; while he’d been there (following days of looking into property lines, population density, and missing person reports), he’d left counting sigils, ones that would darken a bit more with each bit of evil that passed near them, but it’s also been months since he’d checked them. It’s a bullshit excuse, though, since that should mean that Sam should be road-tripping it to Montana, and instead, he’s training and making unexplained trips into Portland every other day. Sam wants to be insulted, but Max’s suspicion is right, not that he’s straight out guessing that Natty is in a coma and that Sam is frequently checking in on her at the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center posing as a relative.

He isn’t sleeping well, the nightmares of doing the same thing to the other Kids, and even to Dean playing in his head when he’s defenseless and unable to block them out. He wonders if Ava had been in a coma as well. He’d left her for dead in the loading bay of Harbour Freight, and driven away while trying to staunch the bleeding from the two bullet wounds she’d made in him, one a graze, the other not so much. He’d lied to Max then too. In fact, it had been by omission then too, because he’d talked about it being one of the uncollected Azzy Kids that had come after him, but he sure as fuck hadn’t talked about eating the blackness in her and taking it for himself.

On the 12th day following Sam’s attack, Natalie Langdon dies. She’s the first innocent person he’s ever killed. After getting the call, he drives into Portland, circles the hospital, but can’t bring himself to go in. What’s the point? To pretend he’s Tanya Clarke’s grieving brother and not the psychopath who had put her in a coma and given the unidentified woman a fake name so not even her family could find her? Instead, he drives to the public locker with her stuff. He stares at her bag for fifteen minutes, until someone with more compassion than he has asks if he’s okay. He doesn’t answer, just locks it back up and flees.

He finds a bar, one of the few unpretentious ones, and he slings back drinks. If it was easy to come by, he’d try something harder, but Sam, for all the evil in his blackened heart, has never purchased street drugs, wouldn’t even know how to go about it. The alcohol isn’t as gross as the beers he’d shared with Dean on the Impala. He stops being able to really taste it three drinks in anyway. When they call an end to his boozing, ‘It’s my responsibility to cut you off,” the bartender had said, no judgment, just resolve, he doesn’t fight it. He declines the offer to call him a cab, a nice touch, and he steps outside onto the busy street. It’s rush hour time, normal people walking their dogs, or because this is Portland, biking in fancy Tour de France-style gear, briefcases on the back rack.

He’s a murderer. The fog of dark thoughts circles him. He’d thought that at this point, he’d be drawing published comic books, dodging calls from Chal to return to the hunter lifestyle, dating someone handsome and supportive, and learning how to surf. Instead, he’d recruited an army of psychics, fucked his brother, and murdered a person in a loading bay. He’s heard the saying that ‘life doesn’t always turn out like you’d expect,’ but he’s taking that to another level. 

He texts Scott. “Staying oup late. Safe. Kinda. Don’t tell max.” He hits send. Then, he realizes that he meant the opposite, and adds, “Telll max I mean.”

Drinking only makes things hard to do, like texting or walking in a straight line. He still feels shitty, but now it’s shitty with a handicap. He regrets drinking. He goes to where the other drunk people congregate, a small urban park. There, he lies on the grass and watches the sky swirl. Occasionally he hears street musicians and people arguing. He drifts in and out. At least with the alcohol, his imagination is dampened. His guilt still tries to conjure up memories, but they’re as carousel-like as the world. 

Sam is thinking about his 20th birthday and wondering if he’s sober enough to drive when a goateed blond leans over him. It makes him flinch. Max should be two hours away, not standing over him with a judgmental look on his face. 

“What is kinda safe, Sam?”

Sam groans. He gets up, realizes that he’s no longer drunk when the world doesn’t spin, and that he has to pee in a tremendous way. The public restroom is within the park, about fifty feet away, if that. How considerate to their inebriated citizens, he thinks.

“Shouldn’t you be back up at camp?” he asks. Then, before Max can answer, “I’ll be right back.” 

He pisses for what has to be a full minute, holding his breath to stave off the stench of the facilities. There’s no place to wash his hands, and after leaving the enclosure, what he really wants is a shower. Unfortunately, Max is waiting for him when he gets out.

“You know, this is why I texted Scott.” 

Max is glaring the collective glare of a hundred moms whose children have not taken out the trash. “What’s going on with you, Sam?”

The streets are still busy, but now with people on their way to someplace fun rather than returning from someplace grueling. A man with a guitar is lightly strumming, his little beggar sign resting on an upside-down baseball cap, a makeshift collection plate. Max doesn’t get mad often anymore, not since he’s gone all zen, and it’s very rarely at him. It’s about to be though. 

‘It’s bad,’ Sam think-says, tightens his lips until the upper one starts to twitch.

“Yeah, you’re drunk in a park.”

“I don’t even think I am drunk anymore.” It wouldn’t help this conversation even if he was. Max is so worried about him, and he doesn’t deserve that worry. He doesn’t want to sit back on the grass. “Where’s the car?” he asks. 

Max leads him to Colly’s car, a beater Honda, lots of miles and an unrepaired dent in the front. Between them all, they have three vehicles. Though it’s hers, it’s the property of the Azzy militia til Azazel bites it or she leaves. He clunks down heavily into the passenger seat. There’s a pot leaf drawn onto the glove compartment door, compliments of Andy Wilson. She’s slapped him upside the head for doing it but said she wasn’t going to be reselling it anyway. 

They sit in silence while Sam tries to figure out where to start. He’s not drunk but he has just enough of a buzz to slow his thinking.

“Start with what happened with Ava,” whispers Max, and Sam has never before felt so busted. He’d really thought he kept that truth down deep inside him. He should have known his partner would be able to sense that there were details left untold. 

“How much do you already know?” he asks.

Max shakes his head, hard, his eyes drilling into Sam. “Don’t do that. Own up to it. You’re better than this.”

It hits him like a rock to the head. He could lose Max over this. He hadn’t thought there was anything he could do that would make Max bail, but he hadn’t known how far he’d go. Then, he realizes he could lose all of them. What if they all learned they couldn’t trust him and left him to fight Azazel all alone? Or worse, what if they fought without him? He crushes his eyes tight, not wanting to be seen, and hoping to just disappear.

“Sam…”

Right, he has to do this. He tells Max about finding the tainted spot inside Ava, cannibalizing that part of her, finally supplying a reason for how he’s suddenly able to summon lesser demons for practice. He tells him about Natty, and how he’d been focused on the process, and only after seeing her limp body had thought to get her to a hospital. It was like there was the person he was before that moment, someone willing to do anything, sink to any level to get Azazel, and the person after, who had terrifyingly just found that he was halfway down to the gates of hell, path jagged and dark.

The expression on Max’s face when he wraps up his confession stops his heart, and he’s flashing back to a hotel room and Traci’s soft lap when he had lost the most important person in his life. It’s happening again. It’s more than disappointment that he sees in those large blue eyes. He can actually see Max’s epiphany that Sam isn’t who he thought he was. It hurts and Sam’s so scared that his stomach is coiling like a snake, scales writhing to the quick loud beat of his heart.

Max pulls his seatbelt into place, and puts his hands on the steering wheel. “I’ll drop you off at the truck.”

A tear that doesn’t feel like Sam’s own, escapes from his right eye and falls with a splash onto his shirt. He looks down at the tiny circle of saltwater in surprise. “Take a right on Alder.”

* * *

Three days later, not one Azzy Kid has asked why they aren’t relocating, catching easily the vibe between their two leaders (hard to miss since Max hasn’t spoken a word to him since his revelation), and obediently and carefully following orders lest they get caught in the crossfire. 

Under the protection of the camp’s barriers and the visual obstruction of tons of trees. Sam’s got Colly upside down, levitating her in the air. Her face is remarkably red; Sam can see that between his widespread fingers. “You’re not even fighting me!” he growls. There are maybe 20 feet between where he stands and where she hangs, motionless, suspended only by his will. 

“I’m too busy fighting not fainting!” she yells back sassily.

Impressive though Jake and Brianne’s powers are to watch in action (a 20-year-old woman holding a car above her head is pretty neat), these mental powers will probably be far more useful in their upcoming confrontation than the physical. He pushes them to work harder at these sorts of things because though they're physically the strongest, they are the weakest psychically. Colly’s got psychometry, meaning that she can touch things and pull information about it or things that have interacted with it. Practicing on belongings of the Kids has led to more than a few awkward moments, such as her experiencing Jake’s loss of virginity while touching his letterman jacket. While this alone is useless to them, she’s quite capable telepathically and in demon extraction. Her telekinesis, which this particular exercise targets, needs improvement.

“Jake, can you help her?”

It only takes a heartbeat of time. Jake’s been waiting for the opportunity to step in, to rescue Colly from invisible binds. Sam feels him try, mental fingers prying weakly at his grip. It feels like a child trying to outwrestle its father. It’s not exactly a fair fight; since he’d killed Natty, his power is running on double espresso.

Colly calls out, “Dammit, Sam, it’s not working and I really am going to pass out!”

She’s pretty tough, so he takes her warning seriously; if it had been Natty waving the white flag, he’d push harder, but Natty’s training days are over, he reflects guiltily. Slowly, Colly rotates, but he doesn’t lower her. All the same, she looks relieved, breaths coming in gasps. Sam looks to Brianne. “Brianne, work with Jake?”

They can disarm each other fairly well, but Sam, he’s got more power than they all do together if Max is excluded. At the moment, Max is excluding himself, though he is present, his legs in a semi-lotus position as he reads Jonathen Franzen on a scratchy blanket nearby.

Brianne’s mental hands join Jake’s as they try to break the connection. “No good,” Sam says. “Instead, try lowering her yourselves. Just provide a counter-force.” It probably won’t work, but he wants to see if they can at least make her dip downwards. They do have gravity on their side.

In the early evenings, they poof away some of the never-ending supply of lesser demons that Sam can now conjure. Though they’re not the same as regular demons (hence why they still travel to Portland and Seattle on occasion), it’s exhausting work and it helps them build up an appetite before dinner. 

“Come on, guys!” Colly yells, encouraging them as much for her own sake as for their progress. She’d already been practicing earlier with some items that Scott brought back from a trip up to Olympia, and it could be that she’d tired out her ESP for the day. Lord knows they’d all experienced mental fatigue from overexertion. Sam reaches that point nearly every day, but he also sees the growth of his powers every day as well. 

When the time comes, it might just be him and Max fighting Azazel while the other kids get picked off like pawns; Sam’s still working off the assumption that Max is still in this, even if he’s not the biggest fan of their group’s founder at the moment.

“Max, you wanna help us out?” asks Jake, voice straining.

Max looks up from his book, assessing the situation. “Not my turn,” he replies, either deciding that his intervention isn’t needed or unwilling to enter into Sam’s mind even as a combatant. 

Scott laughs. He’s also reading (the newest in the Ender’s Game series that he can’t shut up about), but he sets down his book and throws in his mental weight. 

The addition of Scott finally tips the scales in the others’ favor, and Sam struggles to keep her up. If push came to shove he could keep it up a lot longer, but she’s pretty eager to get down, and Sam’s ready to move onto something else. He announces that the exercise is over. He lowers her to the ground. Her arms stretch out around her, ready to catch herself if she falls. Their landings have not always been smooth. This one is, because it’s Sam doing it, and he sets her gently to her feet. Unfortunately, her legs don’t hold her, a result of the time spent upside down, and her ass drops onto the grass. She rubs at her head, dizzy. Jake darts over to her, concerned. 

“Why did I have to be upside down?” she asks rhetorically. 

He knows that she isn’t bothered. He answers anyway because the others might be wondering. “It weakened you.”

“Yeah, who wouldn’t it weaken?” asks Jake, sounding annoyed. He’s always so quick to play knight to the women in camp, as though they aren’t as capable or more capable than he is. Hell, Jake might not even be as physically strong as Brianne. His ego irks Sam. 

“Care to see if you can handle it better?” he snaps. 

Before Jake can reply, an alarm goes off. Sam’s mind quickly ascertains that there is a breach on the opposite side of the property, the east perimeter, can feel the breaking of that section of the psychic fence that surrounds the camp. There is also a physical fence, split rail with mesh wiring, inconspicuous rustic wilderness look, but carved on the interior side with more runes and symbols than a witch’s grimoire and coated freshly each morning with salt. 

Max asks, “Could just be a hiker?” as Jake helps Colly to her feet.

Sam doesn’t answer. For once, he isn’t trusting his powers, because they’re telling him something unbelievable. He moves. He can sense Max behind him, then, the others. They should go to the ammunition shed first; that’s the careful thing to do. He can’t be careful right now, not with his blood burning with intuition. The entire camp only takes up about twenty acres, so it doesn’t take long to get there, would take less time if it wasn’t so densely filled with trees and shrubbery. The trespasser hasn’t gotten very far from the triggered alarm point. 

Sam’s powers are accurate.

“Dean?” he asks.

* * *

Future Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - February 2002

They’re taking a break, palms full of splinters and as dry as the twigs underneath their backs. They’re both in long, low-quality tee shirts purchased at Walmart and denim shorts. Their bare legs are scratched all to Hell. They’re getting really efficient at erecting the campsite. It’s their third one and Max isn’t even pissed that the other Kids are off on some adventure while they’re left to do the menial tasks because they’re having this bonding time just the two of them and he finally has the opportunity, the perfect moment, to tell Sam how he feels. 

The thing is, that Max knows what the response will be. He knows that Sam doesn’t feel the same way. Ever since he first felt the stirrings of a crush, and with how gorgeous Sam is and how he’d swooped in, rescued Max like a knight in shining armor, he’d assumed that’s all it was, Max had been trying to figure out if Sam was gay. In three years, Sam has never shown a romantic or sexual interest in anyone, male or female. In the end, whether he likes boys or not takes a backseat to the real problem, the one that Sam will have to say in response to his confession. Sam will say that he’s not capable of loving someone else after his first love, just like Traci warned him last year. 

Max knows that Sam isn’t going to be thrilled by his words, but it’s been two years, and the urge to release them, to put his intention out there into the universe, is killing him. Luckily, the time that he’s had to ruminate on how to handle this situation has given him the forethought to avoid blurting out, “I love you! You saved my life and I would die for you!”, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds considering their deadly mission to kill a demon, and instead ask, as casually as he can, “You ever have a girlfriend?”

The certainty, the lack of hesitation, in Sam’s reply (“Nope.”) leads him to then ask, “Ever have a boyfriend?”

Between them, there is quiet, but it doesn’t extend to their surroundings. The forest is a peaceful cacophony of wind blowing through trees and branches, birds performing pantomimes of Jewish mothers, and the stream bubbling nearby. Max is elated at the lull. It had been a guy, then, that broke Sam’s heart. Of course, he doesn’t want Sam’s heart to be broken, but that it was a dude, that Sam is gay, or gayish, means that he might have another boyfriend someday, and Max hopes he’ll be that boyfriend.

“I thought I did,” Sam says, voice as solemn as a graveyard. Max glances over at him, sees the complete sorrow on his face. How bad must the breakup have been for Sam to go from content and peaceful to nearly crying in an instant? Max knows a variant of that feeling because of his family. He and Sam are so alike in that way, so easy to injure. No matter how many times Max had been his father and uncle’s punching bag, he’s still open to new pains. It almost hadn’t been that way though. With the powers had come new anger. It felt like a wall of fog that had descended down over his life, over his heart. If Sam hadn’t come along right when he did, eagerness to start this mission and empathy for Max’s plight written across his face, it would have ended in violence. It would have been a bloody end for Max’s family or Max himself, maybe both. Max knew the overwhelming tandem of power and hatred would have been unstoppable.

He bumps an elbow against Sam’s arm, just a small, ‘I’m there for ya, bro’ type gesture. “What happened?”

A short exhale, nearly a laugh, serves as a response. They lie in silence for minutes, long enough for Max to think that the noise was the only answer he’s going to get, but then, Sam elaborates… vaguely. “I thought I could fix him. I thought maybe just loving him enough would fix him. Instead, it only fucked things up worse. Everything I touch gets all tainted.” He looks with red but dry eyes at Max and Max’s stomach, true to form, squirrels. He’ll cherish this moment, as he does any spent in intimacy with Sam, even if it’s a sad moment. “I think it’s the demon blood.” Max wonders if that’s what his own wall of spite had been created from. “I hope so, anyway.” He’d like to think so too, that maybe Max Miller wouldn’t have turned into a murderer if it wasn’t for that pesky demon blood spilled down his throat while he was still in diapers.

There isn’t anything soothing he can say. While he doesn’t doubt that Sam is telling the truth, there are whole galaxies of details that he still doesn’t feel comfortable sharing. Max is afraid to ask and to have the request for more information rejected. He doesn’t want to push his luck. So, he continues just looking into Sam’s eyes until Sam looks away.

“His name is Dean.”

* * *

Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - May 2003

It’s Dean standing there, a 6’2” apparition, a manifestation of dreams and memories filled with blood and sex. Sam’s grieving mind was supposed to have exaggerated the full lips and sharp, angled jaw, romanticized them, but Dean is just as beautiful as he remembers and, other than an eyepatch, a dashing strap across his face, hasn’t changed a bit.

“Dean?” Sam asks again, this time the word sounds less like a prayer, more like a question, like it should. There’s just no way in hell that it can be Dean, not after all this time, not after all the miles.

“Sammy,” Dean whispers, face alight with pure joy. He crosses the distance between them, a negligible thing. For a split second, they face each other, only inches of distance between them, and then Dean’s hands are on his cheeks and Dean is kissing him, fully and passionately. Sam is overcome by the feeling of homecoming. Their tongues meet and his hands move behind Dean’s hair, pushing his head from the back, thumbs stroking Dean’s earlobes. It’s a desperate kiss, one that has no traces of the earlier lazy kisses when they’d had an entire summer to indulge in each other. This is really Dean, not a dream, not a memory, but Dean who smells like leather, tastes like ketchup and beer, and makes a sound like a sad puppy when Sam’s thumb circles lower over his throat.

It can’t last forever but it can’t happen again, and that makes it so much harder to stop now. Once this moment ends, that’s it, because Dean is kissing him and that means that he doesn’t know the terrible truth, that Sam has to be the one to tell him. What they had that summer and right now are all they will have and Sam begins to cry because he doesn’t want it to end. Finally, he pulls back, just a bit, enough so that they can both suck back saliva and breathe fresh air. Their foreheads stay together though, still united.

“You…” Dean pants. “Are a bitch to find.”

“How did you find me?”

Dean kisses him again, just a hasty smash of lips this time. “Well, it wasn’t easy. You notice that it took me over three goddamn years.”

“You shouldn’t have been able to find me. The camp is protected, really protected.” Even in this moment of joy, of reunion, he can’t turn off Leader Sam, the one who protects and teaches his recruits. If Dean can find them, then Azazel can definitely find them. 

“You forget who you’re dealing with?”

“Dean…” his voice actually cracks and his crying becomes actual sobs. It’s too cruel that it’s falling to him to tell Dean. It’s too much to bear. 

Dean’s arms enfold him so tightly, Sam pretends for a moment that he is safe, that he doesn’t have to hurt them both, that he can just stay here forever. Dean whispers to him, “Hey Sammy, it’s okay. I got ya. I got ya.”

But it can’t stay this way. It’s probably gone on too long as it is, letting Dean kiss him, kissing him back, when he’s apparently the only one who knows that they’re brothers. Tainting things again. So, he pulls away from Dean, at least as much as the gripping arms will allow. He looks into the one crystal green eye (did he really hurt his other eye or is the patch for show?) and says, “We need to talk.”

* * *

Best Western - Mt. Hood, Oregon - May 2003

Chal twists her fingers, massages the teeny muscles there, and keeps reminding herself to unclench her jaw. Sam is so close that she imagines that she can sense him, though that is an angelic ability lost long ago. Real or not, she’s trembling with it. When John speaks to her, she jumps.

“Baby, you’ve got to calm down. We’ll see him as soon as Dean talks to him. You know he can smooth over anything.”

“I do not believe he will want to see me.” She looks into her fiance’s face, tries to read if he is under a similar belief, but his eyes show only sympathy. It’s selfish and she says so. “He is  _ your _ son and Sam’s acceptance of that is more important than…”

John interrupts her in the sweetest way, with a kiss. His large, coarse hands circle her wrists, stilling their movement. In a soft but not gentle voice, he chides. “Chal, you raised him. You are the only mother he’s known.”

It sounds like what Dean’s been telling her for years. It’s true that she protected him, but the raising was largely done by time and natural human development. Mary Winchester nee Campbell was Sam’s mother. Chal has just been doing what her conscience has told her to do, the best she can manage without angelic direction.

Chal only challenges John’s sentimentality with a look not with words. He argues back anyway. “He loves you. He might be mad, but he’ll remember his real feelings. I think he will want to see you.”

“If he does not, I won’t stand in the way of your reunion.”

John sighs. “Well, that’s very big of you, but you’ll be there too.” He strokes her cheek. “Should’ve guessed you angels’d be doomsayers. Big fluffy wings, shiny gold haloes, and cynicism stacked to here.” He holds a hand up to her nose.

It makes her smile. “Sam always told me I was an optimist.”

“Life’s been harder for you since we first met.”

That she can’t argue with, and she suppresses the urge to remind him that she’s the one responsible for her own suffering. Instead, she kisses him. She toys with the idea of initiating sex, but she is sure she is too distracted, too nervous. Instead of deepening the kiss to ignite his lust, she withdraws from his arms. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

Several thoughts float over his face, clear enough that she can identify them. So when he nods and says, “Take Cujo,” she understands that he is fighting his protective nature and demonstrating his respect for her ability to guard herself. It seems that as her understanding of her beloved deepens, so does the ease in which they communicate and collaborate. This will be a good strong marriage.

“And my phone and the XD.”

He smiles, worries somewhat allayed. It is a blessing, she thinks to be so cherished. “You can take the Colt too,” he whispers. Taking their best weapon to defeat Azazel (and the most lovely message that at least one angel still cared about her) would definitely be overkill for taking a stroll on an Oregon evening, but it offers solace to know that it’s there - hidden away in a compartment in the truck right beneath the 300-pound waheela.

The night is cooler than she expects, since the day had been so balmy. It refreshes, this botanical scent and cooling pavement scent. Cujo lopes happily beside her, wildly alert and at home under the nearly full moon. Unlike most supernatural creatures, the full moon quiets the waheela’s mood, a time for rest and enjoyment of a previous brought down carcass. Rocks and road debris kick out from her feet.

“Will he be able to forgive me, Jo?” she asks.

It was by the grace of God that John had forgiven her. She’d been certain that he would not, just as she was now with his son, but she’d been wrong; if God was merciful, she would be wrong this time as well. 

She’s only gone an hour or so, and she slides the keycard into the lock ready to be greeted by John. Instead, she faces a room that’s been torn apart in a struggle and a note pinned to the wall dramatically with one of John’s knives. She’s got her phone out before she reads the first words. By the time it goes to Dean’s voicemail, she is a volcano of rage and fear. Azazel has kidnapped John.

* * *

Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - May 2003

The makeshift cabin that Sam drags him to looks like the kind of thing kids slap together in summertime, a place to tell scary stories, with wavy sheet metal, particleboard, rusting nails with ½” heads, and a rectangular beach towel serving as a door. It’s semi-private, more than anything that Dean needs. He can’t keep his hands off; the possessed perverted things grip at hips and shoulders, and then they’re inside the structure, and it's his whole body magnetized to Sam. He feels more like his old self than he has in years. He’s horny and smart-alecky and his life isn’t on pause anymore, because he found Sam. Sam!

“Dean!” growls Sam, pushing flat palms against his chest, and it gets through to him, as it probably should have before, when his pawing was met with light slaps. His boots bang into a crate that Sam’s using as a nightstand and he stumbles backward a bit. 

“What?” 

“We can’t do that,” Sam hisses. His eyes are still bright red from the crying, and he looks in awful turmoil, and the sense of right that Dean’s had since he spotted Sam’s stupid shaggy brown hair lessens. Something has changed. Of course it has. It’s been years. It just hasn’t changed for Dean.

“Why the hell not?” he asks, anyway, feeling terribly insecure suddenly about where they stand and how Sam feels about him.

Sam’s face, so much more masculine and grown-up but still so young and tender in its pain, grows dark. “I thought she’d tell you,” he whispers. It’s so soft that Dean almost doesn’t catch it. 

“Who?” he asks. 

There’s only one ‘she’ they both know. What had Chal not told him? For too long he doesn’t understand, and in the time it takes him to, Sam’s built up his nerve, because Dean’s epiphany arrives right as Sam says, “Dean, we’re brothers.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. 

It steals Sam’s breath, and he places one large mitt of a hand onto his own chest, as though he might pass out. Dean steps towards him, but doesn’t touch, doesn’t need to be reminded that his newly handsome brother doesn’t want that. “I… I can’t…” Sam stutters out, going into a full-blown panic attack; Dean can hear his breaths, raspy, and fast.

“Hey, hey. Calm it down, okay? You’re fine. Breathe. You’re freaking yourself out. Everything’s fine.”

Sam’s eyes are huge. “Everything’s fine?!” he parrots incredulously. “What do you mean you know? You kissed me, and you know? How could you do that? That’s not what happens between brothers, Dean!” He’s got his hands in his hair and he’s tugging, and now Dean’s worried that he’s the final straw in some mental breakdown that Sam’s been barely staving off. 

Dean only knows how to make light in situations like this, but a groan-inducing joke doesn’t seem like it would go over well right now, so he mutters inane things, tries to soothe as Chal does to Cujo when she meets him at the door. 

“You… you know. She told you?”

“She told me the day you ran away,” he answers. “It doesn’t change anything.”

He doesn’t expect the pained bark of laughter from Sam, doesn’t it expect to be wounded by it. Sam’s spinning in place, sweat and tears on his red cheeks. Dean looks around for a paper bag. People always breathe into those when they’re freaking out. He’s seen his share of people freaking out, but he’s never felt so desperate to calm one down. 

“What do you mean it doesn’t change anything? It changes everything!” Sam’s shaking like a leaf and Dean wants so badly to hold him. Instead, he drops to his knees on the particleboard floor, reaches out, and touches one of Sam’s boots. “What? What are you doing?”

“I know you don’t want to be touched, so I’m touching just your boot.” 

“That’s… that’s fucking stupid!” he yells, but Dean prefers the confusion in his voice to the rage that had been there seconds ago. 

“Yeah, well, I have my moments, okay? I can’t be brilliant all the time.”

There’s a long pause before Sam moves his foot away. “Can you just make me understand?” he asks, voice much softer. 

Dean looks up (man the kid just kept growing, didn’t he?) and shrugs. “It’s not a problem for me, kid. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my time, but having sex with you ain’t one of them. Hell, just being with you is one of the purest goddamn things I’ve ever done!” 

Sam lowers himself down, til he’s sitting on his ass in front of Dean. The floor is really uncomfortable, so Dean adjusts that way too, stops himself from reaching out and touching Sam’s leg. He continues trying to explain something that’s been unwinding itself in his head over the years. “I think you had to be my brother...to get under my skin like you did. Like, maybe that’s why you’re the only person I can be myself with. You wouldn’t get me if you weren’t a Winchester too.” 

“That’s so fucked up, Dean.” Sam says, and it’s defensive, which he’d really rather not have Sam be right now, but at least he can spot it. 

“So’s everything else. Besides, I have it on good authority that we all came from two people, so humans are just, like, incest bunnies.”

Something about that rubs Sam the wrong way, word choice or intimation of Chal, and he shakes his head vigorously. “No, it’s not natural.”

“Not natural? Sam, we’re hunting a demon who murdered our mother and gave you superpowers. Last month I ganked a monster who looked like a five-year-old girl. Unnatural is our norm, dude.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. Dean hopes it’s about the girl/monster, and not his refusal to participate in copious amounts of lovemaking and relationship bullshit with him. He can’t tell with Sam’s eyes closed like they are. He wants to bridge the small distance between them, kiss away the worry and anger. “I can’t.”

Dean swallows down the huge stone of rejection in his throat. It feels like he’ll choke on it, but he’s rehearsed this part, knows the words by heart. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want for me. You can be my boyfriend again if you want, hell, you can be my husband if they ever start doing that gay shit here in America…” That last bit hadn’t been in his rehearsal - he’s nervous. “You’ve got the choice there. But you don’t have a choice in being my brother. We are blood and you are always going to be my brother. You can’t shake me, not for any longer than three years anyway. Even if it’s all we ever are, I’ll be happy just having my baby brother back.”

It was one thing for the kid to cry, but now Dean’s starting to leak too, and he doesn’t do that, not in front of others. He wills the tears to suck back in. “Been looking for you my whole life, Kiddo.” It’s not even an exaggeration.

He must have said something right, because Sam’s falling forward, into his Dean’s arms, and they’re both crying like fucking dorks on the shitty hard-ass floor. 

“I’ve done some really bad things, Dean.” His voice is muffled by Dean’s shirt, but the emotion and intent is crystal clear.

“Join the club, Sammy. I think I’ve got a t-shirt in Baby’s trunk.”

Sam snorts. “Can you decide if you still want me around  _ after  _ you hear them?”

“Before and after, still the same answer.” 

Sam may have said that everything’s changed, but if that’s the case, then why does it feel like everything’s right where it should be? He strokes the long tangle of hair. It doesn’t smell like it used to. “You kinda stink,” Dean says.

This gets a chuckle from Sam. “Try living in the woods for three years and see how you smell.”

“Like a fresh cut petunia, as always,” says Dean.

They hold each other, and he can’t read Sam’s mind, but he thinks that they both needed this. He’s not gonna push Sam for an answer about the boyfriend (or husband - why had he said that?) thing, but he’d meant what he said about not letting him run away again. 

Finally, Sam leans back, rubbing at his damp eyes. He reaches out a hand to Dean’s cheek, and the touch feels as amazing as their kisses earlier had. In a very quiet hesitant voice, Sam asks, “What happened to your eye?”

This one he’s been practicing too. “I promised Chal I’d keep an eye out for you.”

* * *

It’s the wee hours of the morning and Sam’s mouth is dry from all the talking when the perimeter alarm again goes off. He jolts upright from his formerly slack position against Dean’s side. “There’s something at the fence,” he says, cluing Dean in. A suspicion hits him and he glares full force at Dean. “Did you bring  _ her _ with you?”

Luckily, Dean looks just as surprised as he feels. “I didn’t bring anyone. They’re supposed to be at a Best Western 20 minutes away.” 

Sam pulls on his boots. The lights come on in the neighboring barracks and they cast a glow in the space between his door curtain and the ground.

“Breach!” someone yells. 

When Sam grabs his gun, Dean’s beside him with hands out. “Whoa! Whoa! You’re not gonna need that if it’s Chal.”

“One thing at a time,” snaps Sam. He needs to get to the fence and see what’s going there before making any decisions about how to handle it. Mentally, he sends out an alert: ‘perimeter breach - not a drill - potentially supernatural.’ In all honesty, he’d much rather it be Azzy himself knocking at his army’s door, and not just because it’d be ideal to fight on their warded ground.

The sky has already started its transition into day, but just as a slight pink on the horizon, and they find their way to the perimeter by flashlight. Though they move stealthily, he can feel his soldiers with him, tense but prepared. They’re fanned out, converging on the central point. The intruder hasn’t moved, meaning it can’t cross the fence. 

“Sam! Dean!” he hears before he sees. The wistful relief of hearing Chal’s voice for the first time in years is entangled in barbed wire, and it cuts sharp as he gags on the conflicting love and hate in his throat. 

Sam aims both flashlight and gun at the fallen angel. “You have until the count of three to leave,” he says, his voice sounding more like Dean’s than his own, rough and capable. He mentally downgrades the alert to a yellow, orders them to group near the fence. He doesn’t trust her to tell the truth, but he definitely doesn’t think she’s come to attack them.

Chal holds up a sheet of paper. “Azazel has John.”

Sam lowers his gun.

“What do you mean he has John?” yells Dean, conciliatory demeanor instantly forgotten. He charges forward, stopping just short of the fence, and snatches the paper. 

Chal keeps her voice loud, seeming to speak to him and all the new arrivals, rather than just Dean. “It’s a ransom note. I found it in the hotel after walking Jo. He has taken John hostage.”

Sam shines his light on the paper.

“I can’t read this,” says Dean angrily.

Sam, reading over his shoulder, explains, “It’s Enochian.” That son of a bitch had written it specifically for the fallen angel to find. He curses the demon more as he reads the words.

“Well?” asks Dean.

“Who’s been abducted?” he hears someone ask.

Without inflection, since it’s pompous bad guy bullshit, he translates. “Dear Sam, it’s time my general took up his new post. Rally your troops and come say goodbye to daddy. May the name of our fallen lord…” Sam stops, knowing how blasphemy makes Chal feel, besides, it doesn’t serve any purpose. “Stupid Satan worship shit,” he summarizes. “Then he’s got coordinates.”

“Wyoming,” says Dean, understanding that much of the note. It’s impressive that he’s got them memorized like that.

“Azazel has fired the starting gun,” says Sam. With all their lights converging, he can easily see their faces: Jake, Scott, Brianne, Colly, and Andy, all pumped up on adrenaline and waiting for an explanation and orders. “Where’s Max?”

It’s Colly who answers, a bite to her words that she intends. “No one’s seen him since your smoochfest.”

Max and his pointless crush, the warm tender words and feelings that he sometimes lets slip through their connection. Sam had warned him - he tarnishes everything, even a thing so pure as Max’s adoration. “Right,” he says. “Okay, yeah.” He pushes the pain aside, switches over into leader mode. “Okay, Scott, contact Max, and let him know what’s happened and that we’re leaving.”

“What  _ has _ happened?” Scott asks.

“Who is John?” asks Brianne.

It takes courage to say. “Our father.” He swallows the fear of the others’ judgment down. This is why they can’t be together. So, that he doesn’t have to always explain that they’re brothers who have ‘smoochfests.’ The uncertain looks that go around his people bother him, but it’s secondary right now. 

It occurs to him how selfish it is, making them rush off to battle demons because his family is in trouble. They’ve left behind their families to follow him. He hadn’t formed this group to rescue anyone. This was about slaying the evil that had permeated their lives. 

He’s done a lot of studying about leadership since he came here, and he’s found an MLK quote particularly true: “A genuine leader is not a searcher for the consensus, but a molder of consensus.” When he’s confident, they follow him. If he took their individual complaints and preferences into account, nothing would ever get done. They have to work as a unit to succeed. He tucks away his doubts, puts them where the memories of Dean had been imprisoned for so long, and had now left an open spot.

“This isn’t about him, though. This is what we’ve been training for. We have Azazel’s location. We have the abilities. This is it.” It’s a terrible inspirational speech, and he hopes he can come up with better before they get to Wyoming. “Colly, load up rations, we’ve got a long drive. Jake, Brianne, weapons and ammo. Andy, first aid, protective wards and fetishes. Scott, after you’ve talked Max back, map out these coordinates and send them out to the phones.” He takes one last look at the coordinates, trying his best to memorize them but he doesn’t want Scott thinking he doesn’t trust him by writing them down or snapping a picture with his phone. “Everyone, grab your own cell phone chargers, guns, and anything else you think you’ll need for a two-day trip. We will be back for the rest.” That’s optimistic.

When he looks at Dean again, he sees a familiar spark in his eye. Oh, the commanding voice. Dean’s reaction is so inappropriate for, and incongruous with the situation that Sam’s heart warms immediately. How could anyone not love this goober?

Everyone disperses to follow Sam’s orders which leaves him with the dilemma of the fallen angel at the gate.

“Are you stuck on the angel wards?” he asks her.

She nods with distress. “I am surprised by that.”

Considering that he’s seen her freaking  _ draw _ anti-angel sigils, so is he. He bluffs. “We are very powerful.”

“I’m glad,” she says sincerely. 

Dean reaches out and touches her shoulder; Sam looks away. “You okay?” he asks. Sam doesn’t hear her answer, so it must have been just a gesture. He slips the gun into its place in the back of his pants. 

“How long of a drive is it to Wyoming?” he asks Dean, not nearly as familiar with travel as the other hunter. 

“‘Bout 15 hours.”

“We’ve got two trucks and a car. We’ll probably be taking all of them. If you don’t mind, I’ll ride with you.” He never thought he’d get to ride in Baby again. With the weird pink colors in the sky, the sleepless night, and the reality of Dean and Chal’s existence, he feels like he’s dreaming. 

“I’ve got Jo in the Sierra Grande, and she won’t allow passengers, but I would be happy to help transport any equipment,” Chal offers.

“Absolutely not!” Sam snarls. “You’re the reason we’re having to do this in the first place. You’ll go back to wherever you live now, and let me and Dean handle this.”

“Lawrence,” she says. For a second, he thinks she’s naming a man, then he gets it. She’s been waiting for him to return to Lawrence. He thought about it, touristing the spot where his mother was murdered and he was turned into a monster. The urge waned, though, once he got things set up with the camp. It wasn’t useful for finding the other Kids. It just felt pointlessly morbid. Maybe if he’d been older when Azazel had tried to snatch him, but he’d been six months, still in diapers. That place is no more home than anywhere else for him. In his life with Chalendra, he’d grown accustomed to leaving a place and not looking back. “And I won’t. He is my mate, and I will assist.”

Her mate. “Boyfriend, Chal!” he yells. “You’re a human, start learning to talk like one!” He’s furiously, suddenly, about her slow integration amongst his species. It’s been almost 15 years since she’d lost her grace; at some point, it’s just stubbornness. 

“Fiance,” she corrects.

He frowns at her. He’s just now realizing that he’d said her name, the first time since he’d purged his life story to Traci in a shitty motel between Vegas and Chesapeake. “Fiance?” he asks.

Chal’s got a wide nose and kind of a masculine chin. Her eyebrows are thick, and her hair has been cut super short. Like Dean, she doesn’t look different at all. Is he the only one whom this experience has damaged? Had everyone just been fine without him? He feels like he’s looking more like 30 these days than 20, like the stress is breaking him down. But, she’s been fine - waiting around Lawrence for him to return and getting engaged to her boyfriend, spending time with the man Sam loves. 

“We’re waiting for you,” she says. “I understand it may never happen.” 

“We’ve been putting our lives on hold trying to find you,” says Dean. 

Sam doesn’t know what to say. His life has been building up to 16 hours from now. He didn’t think he’d have to worry about forgiveness. He might not have to, really, because when they square off against Azazel, there’s a good chance none of them will make it out alive. “One thing at a time,” he says, echoing what he’d said earlier. He only has to figure out if he’s going to ever trust Chal again or make love to Dean again if he survives this battle. The focus he’s retained over the years will help him tonight. 

“Stay close to Dean, then. Try not to be as untrustworthy as I think you are,” he warns. 

He walks off to check on the progress of his troops leaving Dean and Chal behind. 

* * *

Motel 6 - 50 miles from Buttfuck Nowhere, Wyoming - May 2003

“Hey.”

“Hey, Willa,” Dean greets. This is going to be a very difficult call. Apparently his apprehension comes across in only three syllables.

“What’s wrong?” 

He’s leaned up against Baby’s side watching the not-very-entertaining Hotel parking lot. He wonders if he’s spent more time on hotel property than the people that own the joints. 

He sighs. Okay, just go for it. He’s faced down worse before. “I cheated on you.”

“What?”

“It was just kissing, but it was a lot of kissing.” It would have been more if Sam had let him, but he doesn’t add that.

There’s a long silence, and he can imagine her going to that gun rack by the front door and snatching up two of the rifles, loading first one and then the other to go hunt him down. Instead, she laughs. “What are you talking about? Cheating? Dean, maybe you should have told me we were datin’.”

He blinks, at a loss for what she could mean. They’ve been dating for a year, hadn’t they?

“Dean, I’ve still been sleeping with other people. You come through town once a month, most of the time we don’t even fuck when you do. You were the one who kept telling me we were just friends.”

Dean hangs up. It’s not his finest hour. He feels betrayed but he doesn’t know who by now. He thinks over the last year, the weeks that he’d stayed at her place, and they’d bonded, staying up late into the evenings talking about their childhoods and shit. He’d had sex with her. It had been hard to break that barrier, but he’d trusted her enough to do it.

She rings back and he answers. “Yeah?”

“Did you call me to tell me you were cheating on me and then hang up on me?” she yells. 

“Yeah, I did. Cause you said you were cheating on me.”

“Dean Winchester, you have never once said you loved me or that I was your girlfriend. We’ve been friends for two damn years and we’ve had sex, what, seven times?”

Dean scowls at the phone, actually holding it away from his body incredulously, as though she can see him, know that what she’s saying is ridiculous. Yeah, they’d never talked about dating, but they had grown so close, and the number of times may not have been that high, but that was only because he’s still in love with Sam….and… there he goes. Yeah, he’s not going to say that. 

“I’d be happy to negotiate a relationship with you, if you’re wanting one, but I don’t want a once-a-month boyfriend. Not that you ever asked me.”

He didn’t. God, he feels about an inch tall. He grips the back of his neck with his phone-free hand, feels the little vertebrae there crackle.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here… I’m an ass.”

“Oh, I am well aware!” she snaps. “You’re also a dumbass, a selfish, cheating dumbass.”

Her words don’t hurt. It’s nothing he hasn’t said about himself a thousand times. What does hurt is the jealousy when he thinks of her sleeping with other guys, but he’s uncertain why in light of the revelations of this conversation. 

“Sorry,” Dean says. “I thought you’d just know, I guess.”

“I didn’t. I thought we were friends that very occasionally slept together.”

He’s not going to make this mistake with Sam. He’s going to keep up the sharing that they did today. He’ll share even the stupid shit that crosses his mind. He’ll demand that if Sam wants to be his boyfriend that they have to be fucking just each other. He’ll verbalize all the bullshit self-doubts and fears. He’ll talk like a chick all the time, or like he should be wearing a big floppy Shakespeare shirt. 

“So, why come clean to me?” Willa asks. “If you cheated, it’s not like I would have found out.”

“I’d have told you in person but I don’t know how tomorrow’s gonna go,” he says. Not telling her didn’t cross his mind. 

“You found the demon,” she guesses. 

“Yeah.”

“And Sam?”

“And Sam.”

She lets out a whoop and that just makes him feel guiltier that even in this moment, she can be happy for him. She’d probably be less happy if she knew that him and his baby brother had engaged in quite a demonstrative reunion. “And is he okay? Was he mad?”

“Yeah, a little, mostly at Chal. But, yeah, he’s good. He’s really grown up.”

“I’m glad. Did you want back up?” she asks. He’s not sure whether she’s offering her own services or some of her contacts at Sanctuary, but it’s thoughtful, either way. 

“No, we’ve got a small army here,” he says with less exaggeration than she knows. “But, Azazel’s a big bad, and it might not go great.”

“Don’t let the Miguel attack make you doubt yourself. You may be a selfish cheating asshole, but you’re a good hunter.” He’s not even sure how she can say that since he’d failed to save her employee and friend, but he appreciates it, even if it’s a lie. “You wanna have a talk about where this relationship is going after you kill the demon and get your brother back in your good graces?” 

“Yeah,” he says, “We can do that.” He’s got a lot of balls up in the air right now; he might as well see how many he catches before bending down to gather any up.

* * *

Sam finds Max by the pool, his pant legs rolled up, ankles in the water. There’s a small white fence that lines the pool, easy enough to jump over once he sees that the gate is locked to prevent after-hours swimming. Max knows he’s coming over, doesn’t flinch when Sam sits beside him and starts rolling up his own pants, but also doesn’t look over at him. The water is cool but feels good, soothing. Sam reads the warning signs by the dim light of the parking lot flood lamps. He remembers Chal teaching him how to swim, just lets the memory run its course, doesn’t try to shove it away as he’s done for so many years. He can almost hear her voice, though it’s unlikely that his memory is that good. “It is very important for humans to know this,” his adoptive mother says. 

“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to offer me an apple?” asks Max. 

Sam smiles. “Nah, you already fell for that one.” 

Max’s shoulder brushes lightly against his. Sam turns and looks at his friend. Max looks half-dead. He’s so much more sensitive to sleep deprivation than the others. Sam thinks it’s because he just feels so much, that he needs the reprieve more. Max’s eyes have large dark circles that he can see even out here in the near dark, but they’re focused, and very sad. 

“I’m in love with you, you know.”

Sam’s heart constricts. He looks away. “Yeah, I do.”

From his peripheral vision, he sees Max nod. Sam swishes his feet in the water, watches the ripples roll outward. Max takes some time before speaking again, his words so careful. He’d had to tip-toe around his father’s anger for too long; he’d learned that just saying whatever pops into your head could get you hit. “Is he the reason you didn’t see me that way, or is it me?” asks Max. Before he can answer, Max interrupts, “That sounded like self-pity. I didn’t mean it that way.” He pulls one foot out of the water, wraps his toes on the curved tiles that form the pool’s edge. “Is he going to hurt you again like he did last time? That’s the most important thing.” 

Sam swallows. “He’s the reason I tried not to see you that way. I wanted to rule out everyone as an option, even you. Sometimes it was hard.” He doesn’t know if the confession will help or hurt Max’s healing process. He just knows that there’s been too much damage caused by untruths and omissions. “I wanted to let you in, but I… Max, Dean is my brother.

“The night our moms were killed, an angel stole me away. I met Dean when I was 16 and didn’t know that he was my brother. By the time I knew, it was way too late, but I still ran away anyway, and tried to leave it all behind me.”

This kills any conversation for a solid three minutes, though he can feel the thrum of Max’s brain attempt to recover. He tries not to snoop, but there’s images that are too loud to ignore. He sees from the outside how it had looked when Dean kissed him, how he’d gone from shock to wilting with misery. “I can’t decide if that makes me feel better or worse,” says Max. 

“Tell me about it,” Sam sighs. “But it wasn’t him that hurt me. It was the truth.”

“And he doesn’t care that you’re brothers?” asks Max carefully, reserving judgment for the incest until he gets answers.

“Apparently not.”

“But you do.” 

“Yeah.” Sam wishes he could be as cavalier about it. He doesn’t care if Adam and Eve were everyone’s great-grandparents; he doesn’t want to be in an incestuous relationship. He’s weird enough as it is. 

“You haven’t decided yet,” says Max, reading him as well as ever. He replaces his foot in the water. 

Sam loves Dean, but he’s not sure if he’s willing to face that stigma, to look society in the eye and say, ‘Fuck you, I’m doing my own thing.’ He’d wanted something normal. Then he’d wanted to not exist at all. Now, he is made up of so many conflicting wants. He wants to love and be loved by Dean. He wants to pet Cujo’s cloud-fluffy fur. He wants to pack boxes with Chal, and tease her about her taste in movies. He wants to get to know his father. He wants to defeat Azazel and purge himself of the demon blood. He doesn’t know how to combine all these wants together.

He wants to not be breaking Max Miller’s heart, because contrary to what his brain has been telling him for years, Sam loves the hell out of him. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he could mean it for so many things. It feels like all he does these days is express regrets. “I’m really fucked up, and I’m trying to fix it. I really am.”

He can feel Max’s eyes on him, so he turns, and when he does, Max’s lips draw near his own. He lets it happen, confused for a moment, and then stunned by the flips that his heart does. The kiss is soft, closed mouth, and tender, everything he’d have thought a kiss with Max would be, if he’d let himself conjecture.

Max eases off, face a little brighter. “Just in case we die tomorrow, I wanted to do that.”

“We’re going to win,” says Sam. It’s not the same as saying that they won’t die, but he knows with the firmest of conviction that they will defeat Azazel, and doesn't even doubt that. He just doesn’t know how many of them will be standing when they do.

“I think so too,” Max says with a smile. 

Sam pulls his feet out of the pool. It’s time to play nanny to everyone, make sure that they’re all tucked in and ready to rest up for tomorrow. Before he stands, Max sets a hand on his leg. “If you tell him no, I don’t mind waiting another three years.”

Part of him wants to take Max into his arms and burrow down into the sweet affection being offered. Instead, he nods, acknowledging the offer, and leaves Max by the motel pool. 


	8. The Final Countdown

Rendezvous Point, Wyoming - May, 2003

Two guard demons in formal suits standing on either side of the church’s double-door entrance open them wide for Sam and his army, their heads inclined forward in reverence. His teeth clench as he walks through, the feeling of evil enticing that power-hungry void that Azazel had created in his soul. His nostrils flare, sucking in hungrily at the disgusting scent of demon. The part of him that had enjoyed drinking Dean’s blood and the power bezoars of Ava and Natty pauses in the candlelit narthex and basks.

Dean becomes alarmed when Sam stops, thinking that his brother has spotted something he hasn’t, especially with the way he looks around, as though flexing his supernatural senses. The others are doing it too, heads tipping back, eyes closing, and he feels very human compared to them, like a lone human in a pack of werewolves. He looks to Chal beside him, but she only shakes her head, and he reads it as a ‘not now’ rather than an ‘I don’t know.’ They’re lagging behind, not the key combatants to this fight. Really, they serve no purpose at all, but Dean needs to be there for support, and to watch Yellow Eyes get the comeuppance he’s so overdue getting.

The double doors that lead to the nave are open. Sam’s boots leave imprints on fresh black plush carpet. The stained glass windows are replacements, disciples now cloaked red-eyed figures, bright yellow light from the sky now blood-red mist rising from the earth, and bearded loving savior now a warped amalgamation of gorgeous angel and twisted demon. 

The pews are filled with clouds of vapor, lesser demons like the ones that Sam conjures up for practice, an unholy congregation. Dean’s rough headcount of them puts them at 150. The ambush that had cost him his eye had been composed of three. There’s a human placed at each of the first three rows of pews along the main aisle but one. Of the five 20-year-olds, all but one look disconcertingly confident; the one looks nervous. Dean recognizes two from his searches: the Kids that Azzy harvested before Sam could. 

A prince of Hell, two demons, 150 lesser demons, and five superpowered, demon-trained humans: when Sam takes on a challenge, he doesn’t fuck around. 

Directly ahead of them, on the altar, John Winchester is naked, bloody, unconscious, and strapped by all four limbs to a six-crossbeam cross, like Jesus as the Vetruvian Man. Chal gasps when she sees him, but otherwise there is pure silence. The figure next to the bound man isn’t human, but it appears to be. Azazel is wearing the same vessel; Sam hopes pettily the bullet he’d fired in Maine is still in it. 

Sam senses no fear from his army, only a kind of bloodlust, like a weakened version of Cujo’s monthly turmoil. They are strong. They are ready. 

-10-

“A little theatrical, isn’t it?” Sam shouts at Azazel, the distance between them warranting the volume. He hears Dean in his words, and feel’s Chal’s training in his continued wariness, even though he feels like he could smash the demon’s skull with a single thought. Overconfidence is dangerous.

Azazel smiles; it’s an ugly thing. “I’m glad you could make it, Sam. It’s good to see you.”

-9-

“Can’t say the same.”

“I was worried that your training would take too long. I suppose my little gift was helpful for your progress?” 

Sam had long suspected Ava to be an offering of sorts; she’d been too underprepared to truly be a threat to him, and Azazel had never wanted him dead.

-8-

“Does your master like talking as much as you do?” Sam asks. Dean snorts.

“You’ll find out all about our master soon, Sam. He’s bringing us a new age. We will no longer grovel before the angels. But, it looks like you’re no longer so angry about the angels' interference in your life?”

-7-

Chal feels faint, the essence of these vile creatures affecting her reason and equilibrium. Either the grace in her is as diluted as a homeopathic remedy but still present, or there is something quintessential to her existence as an angel that rebukes the unholy. She’s not sure which. 

“This isn’t about angels. This is about you, Azazel, and the lives you ruined.”

“I thought it was about your daddy, Sam? Of course, you don’t love him the same way that you do good old Big Brother here.”

-6-

Sam’s not going to be baited. 

“So, what happens next in your twisted mind? Do I kill everyone here but you, kneel down at your feet maybe?”

-5-

“Don’t tell me you aren’t a little tempted to kill everyone here, Sam. I can feel that in you. As soon as you crossed the church’s threshold, you felt the blood inside you cry out for more violence.”

He’s not wrong, and the other Kids agree, can feel it. They want to destroy, and it isn’t only Azazel that their thirst is focused upon. 

-4-

Rather than answering the demon, he looks at each of the Kids he hadn’t been able to find in time. Like their own army, they’re of various genders and races, and they all look simultaneously young and world-worn. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find you first,” he says, heartfelt. “If any of you feel like avenging your family, you’re welcome to help us.” 

-3-

Azazel steps forward. It’s hard not to allow the relief to show. He wants that thing as far from John Winchester as possible. “Oh, they’re loyal to the cause, Sam, just as you will be.”

“You’re crazy. Just because you’re not human doesn’t mean that you’re any better than one of those park preachers screaming about the end of the world.”

-2-

Dean trusts Sam, but doesn’t understand all the talk. He’s waiting for Sam to take action. He doesn’t like the tranced-out looks on the Kids’ faces. They still make him feel like prey. He feels Chal’s hand on his, notices for the first time how woozy she looks. Oh shit. She’s gonna pass out. 

“We’re going to kill you for what you’ve done to our mothers and fathers and us.”

-1-

Movement, a blur, a crack, and Jake Talley slumps to the ground, his neck broken, head twisted around. Brianne, professional weightlifter, and demon-blooded special child all grown, pulls back one of her strong hands, and smiles. 

Shit. 

Everything bursts into havoc.

Brianne reaches out for Colly and Max freezes her in place, but not before she’s already got her fist around the other girl’s throat. Chal falls to the ground, the corruption finally too much for even that sliver of her angelic countenance to handle. Scott snuffs out the nearest pew of lesser demons, focusing on those first, as is his and Andy’s job. Though Andy can’t quite manage a whole pew by himself, he douses out a few. Dean kneels next to Chal, checking how bad off she is; fainting is one thing, but if he needs to get her out of this church, he’ll fireman carry her ass out right now. 

Sam ignores the lesser demons who are now converging on them, and they ignore him just as much back. He wades through them like Moses parting the Red Sea to the center of the church.

Colly’s face purples and Max can keep her from tightening but can’t seem to loosen the strong woman’s grip. “Andy!” he cries out, asking for reinforcements. Scott banishes as fast as he can, his mind struggling to keep up, and to keep the terror that’s started at the base of his skull. He’d seen Jake fall, and it makes this more real, presses the idea into him that they might all die. It’s one thing to read about martyrdom, and another to actually die for a cause.

The heavy-set gal with the Halo t-shirt pyrokinetically grabs the fire from the closest candles and shoots it in a steady stream much larger than the combination of the candles alone could create. Sam holds back the flame with ease, pushing until it vanishes into nothingness back into her hand. 

“Chal, come on!” Dean says, shaking the former angel. He begins to drag her back towards the narthex, only to see the suited guards coming towards their group, faces menacingly full of good-cheer. “Shit! Guys, the guards!” he yells, dragging her towards the chaos but away from the guards.

Andy, finally seeing what Max was asking for, plants his face right next to Brianne’s ear, and yells, “Hey, let go of her!” It isn’t his finest work, and she fights him for a brief second, but then she releases Colly, who doubles over in a gasping wheeze. 

Max, no longer having to hold their turncoat in place, catches up to Sam, bumps his shoulder in a quick movement of solidarity. A guy with thick nerd glasses steps forward, challenging Max.

Having done it twice before, it’s easy enough for Sam to find that clog of evil that’s powering the human flamethrower. He clenches his power around it and sees her face whiten. 

“I think you should take that gun in your holster and shoot yourself in the forehead,” Andy suggests to Brianne. He’s never used his power for this, but he can’t bring himself to feel bad about it, not with Jake's dead body lying on the black carpet of this nightmare church.

One of the demon guards jumps onto Dean who has positioned himself protectively over Chal’s limp body. The swirling vapor of the demons pours out of the vessel, vaped by Scott in pretty late response to Dean’s warning, but the body lands hard upon him, an unconscious sack of human potatoes. The other guard looms over Colly, and she only has a moment to notice before it punches her in the chest, the force propelling her into the pews, and knocking her unconscious. 

Scott watches Colly’s flight, panics, the ability slipping from his fingers. The guard cracks its knuckles and grabs Scott’s collar, a vicious glint in its eyes. His bullshit life flashes before his eyes. It doesn’t feel like enough.

Nerd Glasses pulls out a gun, which Max immediately removes from his hand, knocking it away with a psychic slap. It feels insulting, to think they could take him out with a standard weapon, but then it feels exceptionally clever, when, a rather sizable crucifix rams into him from behind, making him sprawl forward onto his knees. He’d been too distracted by the gun to notice the guy’s telekinesis at work.

Brianne shoots herself in the head, blood splattering on Andy who should have been smart enough to back away first, Scott, who is still standing motionless, and the body draped over Dean that he shoves off angrily, not realizing it served as a useful blood tarp. Sam’s already looking for his next target as Flamethrower sinks to the ground slowly, knees first. Of the remaining three altered humans, he aims for the goth girl, seeking out the blackest place inside her. 

Azazel watches intently. A satisfied grin spreads wide across his face. No one notices.

Andy, seeing the predicament that Scott is in, focuses, raising his hand up as Sam’s taught him. He does better work when high, but since Sam and Max don’t believe him, they’d made him leave his stash at camp. After a small struggle, he pulls the demon guard out of existence. 

Scott starts to cry. 

Max checks for any more incoming replica torture devices first before rising. The skies look clear there, but he does notice Scott motionless with at least five minor demons approaching. “Scott, move your ass!” he yells. He flicks his hand and pulls out those five, but he can’t babysit. The guy with the glasses takes advantage of Max’s distraction, knocks him on his ass again, this time with only mind, no matter.

Dean’s got a straight line out of the church, providing that the lesser demons stay back. He drags Chal out to the narthex, on high alert for more baddies, but not sure what the hell he plans to do if he finds any. 

A ghostly figure appears beside the goth girl, but Sam pays it no mind, even with the strange contorted face it’s making. It doesn’t last long, because Sam’s got his mind grip tight and he’s pulling that essence out. The figure flickers. 

Nervous Guy is looking full-on scared as the battle seems to be dwindling down to just him and the tall blonde girl. He steps next to her, looking like he’s completely up to using her as a human shield if the opportunity presents itself. 

Nerd Glasses lands with his knee on Max's throat, his mind pushing itself with the same intensity as his body. Max can hear words, rhythmic, calm… hypnotic. It becomes harder to focus on the fight.

Sam finishes extracting the goth’s powers and feels them flood through his soul. He’s riding too high off of it. He wants to blow the roof off of the church. Instead, he steps towards Nervous Guy and Tall Blonde. 

The lesser demons’ numbers are dwindling, Andy bursting them as fast as he can in twos and threes. Scott’s hands are shaking and tears are flowing freely down his face, but he has started helping too, the two of them holding a line. 

Dean’s got Chal on the church’s doorstep, afraid to stray too far but worried about her staying too near the battle. He knows she’s a badass, normally, so figures her passing out has something to do with the church. Maybe it is warded against angels. He shakes her. “Come on, Chal. Wake up.”

Tall Blonde shakes her head at Sam before reaching out one hand to the middle of Nervous Guy’s chest. A pained expression crosses his face and he cries out before dropping to the ground. He sweats and shakes, clutching at his chest. She looks up at Sam, no malice and no pleasure. “I’m in,” she says. 

“Smart,” replies Sam. He may not trust her, but he risks a quick look back at his colleagues. He gets as far as Max on the ground with a knee pressed into his throat before grabbing the son of bitch on top of him, hurling him against the church wall with a resounding clap. Max sits up, hands grasping at his damaged windpipe and gasping. 

The end is in sight to the numbers of lesser demons, and noticing this, Scott comes back a bit from his fear, but he’s also weary from the exertion. Andy’s brain has never felt so overworked. It’s like he’s been bench pressing with it.

Outside, Chal’s eyes open. They roll around, not finding Dean at first, but then they do. “Hey, you okay?” he asks. She blinks, disoriented.

Sam turns all of his focus back on Azazel. The demon hasn’t interfered yet in the fracas but now smiles at Sam with what looks like pride. If Sam wasn’t so hopped up on the powers of others, he might be afraid, but he is completely pulsing with the new mental abilities and nearly immune to sensible human emotions. 

It’s Andy who picks off the last lesser demon, a stupid grin on his face. He shares it with Scott who high fives him with a shaky hand. They drift towards Max, help him up off the floor. 

“Well, that was quite the feast for you. I must say I’m surprised that your trainees did so well,” says Azazel. “Some of them,” he adds, with a look at Scott. He, Andy, and Max walk up next to Sam, standing tall and ready to keep fighting. 

-1-

“I didn’t expect the turncoat,” Sam says, charitably granting the maneuver.

“Neither did I.” Azazel turns his yellow eyes onto the blonde woman for a second before looking them over. 

-Now-

On Sam’s mental command, the remaining Azzy Kids focus on the core of Azazel’s vessel, attempting to find the kite string of his essence among the whirling hatred and craziness. For a moment, they are united, all pushing at the edges of that evil entity, Sam even getting a grasp, just one, before their powers fall lifeless. 

It was what Sam was afraid of, an exaggeration of the time in Maine. All their efforts turn to dust, the ability just vanishing on the wind. 

Sam cries out, “No!”

“Yes, Sam. Don’t you see? I gave you the powers. You can’t use them to hurt me.”

“Colt,” says Chal, finally letting her mind think on the item she’s been meditating out of her mind since they arrived, the intensity of her compartmentalization probably encouraging her fainting spell by diverting her attention. “Overalls, front pocket. Kill shot. Now.”

“I, on the other hand, can do whatever I want to you.”

With that spoken, Azazel lifts Scott, Andy, Max, and the blonde girl into the air. They float up, struggling against their mental binds. Sam fruitlessly tries to tug them back down, sees only the slightest waver in their trajectory. 

“You see, Sam. I only need one general.” 

“And I only need one bullet,” says Dean.

BANG

He’s been practicing since losing his eye, and depth perception handicap or not, the aim holds true. The bullet goes directly to the center of Azazel’s forehead. In a surprising light show, it bursts several times illuminating the vessel’s skull. Azazel falls backward, dead. 

The Kids’ bodies drop hard to the ground. 

“That’s for my mother, you sonofabitch,” says Dean.

“What the hell was that?” asks Scott. 

Dean holds up the gun, showing off a little by twirling it Old West style. 

“There was a gun and we’ve been practicing Jedi mind tricks?” asks Andy incredulously. 

One by one, they find their way to their feet. Max cradles his arm carefully; the fall had been enough to break it in the same brittle place it’s been broken twice before. Waiting for the cast to come off will be worse than the pain he’s in now if experience has taught him anything. They were damn lucky, he thinks. Three survivors, not counting their defector. 

He’s underestimating their number, though, because Scott finds a pulse on Colly, though her head’s bleeding out from where it collided with the pew. The humans formerly housing the guards are alive, but shaken, traumatized as everyone has to be once they confront the real world as hunters know it. The bullet from the colt had left both Azazel and its vessel dead. Sam can’t help but feel that’s probably the most humane outcome; none of them had to actually experience the depraved things that went through the demon’s mind, nor had to function as the body to carry out any actions he did. 

John remains unconscious when Dean cuts him down from the profane cross. In the short time that he’d been in Azazel’s hands, he’d been really put through the ringer. He’s missing teeth and a fingertip. His back had been flayed, the wounds wet and adhering to the wood of the cross. Dean swings one of his lifeless arms around his neck, ready to carry him outside, but first he stops to kick the vessel that had contained Azazel, knows he’s not in there but can’t resist. John’s badly hurt, but he’ll live; he’s hunter-strong. 

Max is the first to notice that he can’t feel anyone telepathically. After several attempts to message Sam, he finally asks the others if they can hear him. No one can. No one can use their telekinesis to lift John into the passenger side of his truck, though Dean only gives them a moment or two to try. They feel different, quiet.

On the drive to the hospital, Sam watches the scenery pass by, everything calm and normal. His soul feels cleansed. At least, that’s what he assumes the sensation to be, having never had an unblemished spirit before. His mind feels tranquil and exhausted. There’s a purposelessness that hadn’t been there before he’d started on his path of vengeance, but what he fills it with is going to be up to him, not a scheming demon or a well-intentioned fallen angel or even fate, but him. It’s strange to be lost and to feel so utterly content about it. 


	9. A Place for Everything

South Big Horn Hospital - Basin, Wyoming - May 2003

The conversation with Chalendra is a one-sided fight, a lengthy purgation of years of blame and hurt. It lasts nearly two hours and when it’s over, Sam’s throat hurts from screaming and his eyes from crying. At the end of it, she’s holding his arm, and he’s allowing it, but it’ll take time for him to trust again, for him to feel sentiment towards her that isn’t scabbed over, ready to bleed again at a moment’s notice. They’ll work on it, if she's as honest as she says about her desire to renew their previous bond. Sam has made a mental list of his priorities in restoring his tattered life to what it could have been, and that involves the strengthening of his family ties, even the one that doesn’t involve blood. That means he has to have some seriously difficult talks.

From his hospital bed, John tells Sam the details of the night of Mary’s death from his perspective, a side he’s never heard before. Sam hears the repetition of the tale in all the minutiae his father can still recall; the night of her death had been a mantra powering John’s mission. “And I was knocked out when the bastard died,” he laments, and Sam can empathize; he’s still disgruntled with it being Dean who got the kill shot after how hard he’d trained and how much he’d sacrificed for that satisfaction. 

John asks him what it was like growing up with Chal, and he has to admit, even with the recently spilled rant of bitterness, that it had been pretty good. He’d learned survival from her, and empathy for others. They’d grown up together, learning what being human meant at the same time. It made him more independent than most guys his age, more confident that he can figure out his way in the world regardless of what's thrown at him. Secrets that she should have shared aside, she’d done a good job. 

When he’s finished visiting at the hospital, Dean drives them back to the hotel they’d stayed in the night before. He’d been too exhausted for any deep decisions about where they were headed emotionally, and Dean had tucked him into one bed, and taken the other for himself without asking. He’s sure Dean would happily offer him the same decision-making reprieve tonight as well, but he doesn’t need it. He’s lived the last nearly four years in a limbo, and he’s ready to actually start his life.

Dean locks the door and flips the latch before tossing the keycard on the orange-topped dining room table. “I heard the yelling from the other side of the hospital. Sounded brutal?”

Sam doubts that. He and Chal had had their fight from the cab of the Sierra Grande, and for most of it, they’d had the windows up. They’d both known better than to air Sam’s grievances around the sick and the dying. “Thanks for walking Cujo,” says Sam. “She’d have ripped my throat out if she’d heard me yelling at Chal.”

“Yeah, can’t blame her. Don’t know how much of that Chal deserved,” Dean says, gaze averted, aware that he’s on some tricky territory. 

Sam’s not going to argue with him about this. He knows how he feels and he knows what her lies could have cost him. If Dean wasn’t so accepting of their accidental foray into incest, or if John knew what they’d done, Sam could easily have lost the brother and the father he’d just found. He’ll work on their truce for now, and worry about forgiveness when he has the life stability that he needs to grant it.

“Dean, I want to talk,” he says. It sounds cliché at the same time that it sounds foreboding. If he’d realized it was going to come across so negatively, he wouldn’t have said it. He just wanted to switch the topic to the one on his mind: namely, their relationship. When Dean looks at him, it’s with a serious face, one similar enough to his obedient face that it stirs something in Sam that must forever be repressed. Which is the closest to the real Dean? 

“You don’t gotta rush, Sammy,” he says, sweetly considerate. 

“I do, though,” Sam corrects. He considers sitting on the bed but stays standing instead, just a few feet from Dean, hands wanting to make nervous gestures. He’s just going to shoot for honesty, and Dean will have to forgive him if it’s tactless or nonsensical. “All my life has been about living someone else’s plan for me. The summer we spent together was great for… so many reasons, but one of the big ones was because I got to be free. I got to eat meat and I showed you my drawings, and it was just this time of… being who I wanted to be. I wasn’t just Sam Winchester, demon hunter. I mean, I guess we did some hunting too, but it wasn’t the important part to me and I don’t think it was to you either.

“Now that I’m not someone’s pet project, I want to start my life. I want to make it what I want. So, I have to make this decision sooner rather than later, because I’ve already waited long enough.”

He’s starting to tear up a bit, and he can see Dean bracing himself for what’s coming, and he wishes he could have all of it, but he’s never going to have a normal life with Dean. That’s just not how things work. He can’t just marry his brother, his brother the hunter who can’t stay in one place for too long, and still have what he also wants, stability and normality. He loves Dean, but he has to be selfish about the things he wants to do. 

“I want you to be my brother, Dean,” he says, his voice cracking a bit. “I’m sorry if that isn’t enough.”

“Hey,” says Dean roughly, reaching an arm out and enwrapping him. “You have always been enough. You think it’s settling to have you for a brother?” he asks, emotion warbling his voice too. “

Dean pulls back, holds his face in his rough hunter hands, gazes at him with one intense eye. “I’ve been looking for my little brother my whole life, and I didn’t for a minute think he would ever kick so much ass.”

Part of Sam wants to change his mind, moved by the praise and love. He wants to cross the short distance between them with his lips, but… it’s not actually a short distance. It’s a chasm of taboo and a divide of life purposes. 

“Thank you, Dean,” he sighs, allowing their foreheads to rest together. “I won’t run again, I promise.”  
“You’d goddamn better not, stupid kid, making me chase you all around the place.” He descends into mumbles and swears, and Sam sniffles and laughs. They hold each other for a while, saying goodbye to something that they should never have gotten to have in the first place.

* * *

Formerly Azzy Camp 3: Beyond Thunderdome - May 2003

“We should just leave it up,” says Andy again. He’s the only one who has got his stuff already packed into the truck, and he’s just sulking moodily at them. Losing his Jedi mind tricks really rubbed him the wrong way. He told Max more than once on the drive back up here, that if he’d have known killing Azzy would cost him that ability, he absolutely would have played for the other team. Max, who suspects he means it, graciously doesn’t remind him that not only did the other team not win but that Lily had been the only one to survive being part of it.

The goal had been to grab their stuff and tear down the site, but now that they’re here, it seems like a shame to take down the makeshift buildings. If they were closer to civilization, they could probably serve as temporary housing for homeless people. Out here, the most helpful they could probably be would be serving as a creepy filming location for a reality ghost hunting show.

“It’s not the worst idea,” says Scott. He’s got his duffel sitting on his feet, a jug of water in one hand and a gun in the other. He looks like a doomsday prepper.

“I’m not looking forward to tearing all this down without Jake’s strength,” says Colly. She doesn’t mention Brianne. 

Even if Jake had survived, he’d be like them, powerless, just a typical young adult. Max wonders what Jake would have been like without the rot that they all had. Azazel’s rot had burdened them, placed a heavy weight in their souls. There’s a lightness in all of them. Even brooding Andy has admitted that, phrasing it as only he could, “It’s like all the resin stains have been scrubbed off.”

They wait for Sam to decide, still somehow the leader, even though he’s just like them now. He looks at each of them, the choice waffling in his mind. Then, he shrugs. “Yeah, we can leave ‘em up.”

“That means that we’re finished then,” says Colly sadly.

“I’m gonna miss some of it,” says Scott with a heavy sigh. Max absolutely understands. It had just been the three of them for a while, scheming ways to end a demon, and trying to figure out how much electricity Scott’s powers would let them have out in the middle of the woods. 

“Not the cold winters,” says Colly.

“Not the mosquitos,” Scott adds.

Sam smiles. “Not trying to get you guys practicing in the morning.”

They laugh. 

“What won’t you miss, Max?” Colly asks.

He remembers psychic catch, target shooting, saving people from demonic possession, playing Phase Ten, teaching Jake to meditate, Andy getting Colly too high, sending pleasant mental images to soothe Sam’s nightmares, and hundreds of other moments that he won’t have with these people at this place again. He’s sure there must have been bad times too, but he can’t think of them just now. He just looks around, waits for them to skip over him. 

“Well,” says Andy, moving the conversation along, the most eager of all of them to leave. “Who else is ready to head down?”

“Okay, okay. Damn, you’re annoying,” says Scott. He kicks off the hugs, hugging each of them awkwardly. Andy does too, but more brusquely. 

Colly’s hugs are tighter, and she’s the first one to thank Sam who blushes, for some reason, an unusually modest reaction for their fearless leader. 

“Yeah, thanks, man,” says Scott, meaning it deeply. “Who knows what that thing would have turned us into without you.”

Max nods in agreement. He  _ knows _ what he would have become without Sam Ackles (Winchester, his brain corrects), and it is nothing good. 

“You taking the second truck down?” Colly asks Sam.

Sam peeks at Max, puts his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, Max and I are going to take down the fence, I think.”

He doesn’t even mind Sam volunteering on his behalf. 

Colly smiles, knowingly. “Well, you guys stay in touch.”

And once again, the Azzy Kids’ militia is down to two, just as it started. The camp usually only reaches this level of peacefulness in the early morning, not the afternoon like it is. Max looks over at Sam. “Do we actually have to take down the fence?”

Sam shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, we could. Do you want to?”

He wants to leave everything the way it was, but he doesn’t say that. “What do you think?” he asks.

Max has his bag on one of the short logs that they use for seating around the firepit. They didn’t often light it early in their stay, for fear of catching the park service’s attention, but as their powers grew, their confidence in Jedi mind tricking anyone that came out to cite them vanished. Skewers are still lying in the ashes, the metal sticks just waiting for a piece of meat or a marshmallow. They’ve eaten too many s’mores. Even knowing it’ll be a long time before he eats another one, he can’t say that’s something he won’t miss about the camp. 

“Hey, I can’t read your mind anymore,” says Sam, taking a seat on a log. 

“Yeah,” says Max, sitting on an adjacent one. “It’s weird.” What he means to say is that it’s awful, because his connection to Sam was absolutely, without exception the best part of having been super-powered. “I keep trying, though, and then remembering.”

“Me too,” laughs Sam. “I was trying to tell you that Andy has become a prick without the demon blood.”

“That transcends the need for telepathy,” says Max, also laughing. 

Max is wearing his usual spring flannel - when living outdoors, layers are a smart move, but he feels too warm as if the fire is going in the pit. He takes it off, down to just his t-shirt. He sets it on his bag, pretty sure they’re not going anywhere for a while.

Sam’s nostrils widen, a sign that he’s going to say something important, and Max waits, unaware that he hadn’t even needed any special powers to read that. “I talked to Dean.” Oh, it’s  _ that _ conversation. Max isn’t prepared for that conversation. He’s still reeling from all the bittersweet pangs of nostalgia for the end of an era; he doesn’t want to hear that Sam is getting back together with his brother/boyfriend (how messed up are their lives that it barely fazes him that there’s that combination going on?). He’d rather they just reminisce up here until… well, until snow starts to fall.

“Gotcha,” says Max, even though Sam hasn’t actually told him how it went. It earns him a strange look from Sam, a head tilt of befuddlement. “I mean, yeah, you talked to him...” he says, wanting to slap himself in the face.

“I told him that I’m looking into starting a new life, one that I get to choose, and that it was more important to me to have a brother for that, than, you know, what we were before.”

Oh, never mind then. In that case, Max is happy to hear about the conversation, even if what he’s hearing is more of a delayed reunion than a hard line of “No, brother, I won’t sleep with you again.” Max asks, “And how did he take that?”

Sam shrugs. “He said he’s happy that he has a brother. I mean, I know he wanted to keep up what we had, and I think he’s trying to be cool about it, but… I think he’ll be okay.”

“Good,” says Max. “It was probably pretty hard to tell him that.”

Sam nods. His eyes drifting to the skewers in the pit. Max wonders if he’s thinking of meals that will never be eaten here again too, hates that he can’t just check for himself. “I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Max has some bravery, not as much as some but a lot more than others. He thinks he gets what Sam is implying, and he has to offer the guy as much consolation as he can. “We take risks when we fall in love. It’s like what we just did, fighting Azzy. We all knew the risks going in. We didn’t have a choice that it affected us, but we had a choice to get involved, to fight for a bigger goal.” He’s not sure if the analogy works, but he doesn’t want Sam thinking that he’s a victim here, that Sam’s some evil heartbreaker, because that’s not how things are. 

“I’d like to think that love is less dangerous than defeating princes of Hell,” says Sam, in this new lighter way. Maybe it’s an old lighter way, the Sam that was before he’d found out he was in love with his brother, and become hellbent on revenge; Max never met that Sam, after all.

Max doesn’t answer. At the moment, loving Sam feels infinitely more dangerous. So, he asks, “And what does the new life look like, the one without demons and special powers?”

“Art school in California.”

If a strong breeze had come up, it could easily have knocked Max right off his log. “Art?”

Sam smiles. “Yeah, I uh… I’m actually a pretty good drawer. I want to put out comic books.”

“Really?” To just have something like this come up after so many years together is astounding. Sam, leader of the Azzy Kids, wants to draw comic books. It’s so much more playful of a profession than he can picture for his uptight perfectionist friend. Max feels a little overwhelmed seeing this different side. “Wow. I didn’t realize.”

“I haven’t drawn anything since that day.” He could mean a few different days, but Max suspects he knows which one. “But, I’m done hunting. I’m done moving. I want to get my art degree, get a few decent-selling comic books published, and live in one place where I know everyone in town, and they know me.” Max is charmed. He’d had no idea an idyllic life was even in Sam’s head at all. Maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe Sam was only letting himself dream it now that it’s an option. A couple of weeks ago, Sam had killed a girl to protect the secret of their ramshackle supernatural militia, and now he’s talking about school and small-town spirit, and Max knows that the absence of their soul clogs has changed them, but this much is so extreme. He feels almost woozy with it, a sort of by-proxy elation. 

“Sam, that sounds great. I… wow, yeah, I hope you get all of that.” He doesn’t know what to say. He tries to picture it. Sam would be an awesome student, always turning in his assignments early. He could do home repairs and tend to his garden. It’s just so domestic. It’s not that he thinks that Sam can’t do those things, it’s just that they don’t fit quite right. “Do you have any of your art up here?”

Sam hadn’t expected that. He looks sheepish. “Yeah, there’s the old stuff in my cabin.” Then, after Max gestures a ‘well?,’ he offers to get it.

When he returns with the black portfolio clutched to his chest, he looks nervous. It’s endearing. 

“I’ve only ever shown these to one other person,” Sam says. Dean, Max realizes. Well, he’s flattered, and there’s a part of him who still suspects that he’s being pranked. 

Each page is gorgeous and a labor of love and that ‘pretty good drawer’ crap had been underselling his abilities by a crazy margin. He keeps asking Sam “This is yours?” and enjoying the increasing amusement in the “Yes!” replies. He had no idea. How, after they’ve been tangled up in each others’ heads for so long, can Sam still surprise him?

“So, what are your plans?” asks Sam, the unexpected art show coming to an end, the portfolio closed and underneath Sam’s forearms on his lap.

Max has no place to go. It’ll be a cold day in hell before he returns to Saginaw. He doesn’t have any money and can’t do any mind tricks to pay for goods. He could stay up here at the camp, but he’s not sure how long he can do that on his own, not sure that it would be good for his sanity, even if he could swing it.

“I don’t have any,” he finally answers.

With an impish grin, Sam asks, “How do you feel about California?”

Max narrows his eyes, untrusting the course of conversation. “In general or…?”

“As a potential place for you to go next.”

Does Sam just expect Max to follow him around for the rest of their lives? What would their dynamic be now that they aren’t war buddies, now that he’s confessed his feelings? 

Sam sets one of his large hands on Max’s more delicate ones, and smiles warmly, his upper body leaning towards him. “I told Dean no, and, I don’t want you to wait three more years. I’m done waiting.”

Even though he’s being offered something he’s wanted since he first met Sam on that shitty barn roof, Max takes his time to consider. Oh, his heart is doing somersaults, but he’s not a stupid kid, no matter what his father would yell. “I’m not a rebound or a substitute,” he says. It’s intended to come out assertively, but there’s a higher pitch to the end, like a question. 

Sam shakes his head. “You’re my partner, as always. Not sure if they let old guys like us have dorms, but we could share a place. You could figure out what you want while I attend classes.” With an eye twinkle, he adds, “I could draw you.”

Max’s eyebrows jump up to his hairline, and he feels his cheeks coloring. “I can’t handle you flirting with me,” he says, his voice sounding breathless. He covers his smile with a hand. A matching one sits on Sam’s face. Max’s body feels full of restless energy, and he fidgets nervously.

“Let’s make a new life. One without violence,” says Sam. 

The two remaining Azzy Kids stay at the camp one more night, and they sleep the next day.


	10. Epilogue

The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio - San Antonio, TX - January 2004

“Thomas Robert Winchester. Seven pounds, four ounces.” John Winchester’s bearded face is a beacon that rivals the brightest lighthouse and he’s got it turned full-force to Dean who has no idea if that’s a good weight for a baby or not. He knows it’s super light for a bowling ball. 

“That’s great,” he repeats, because he doesn’t know what else to say. 

Sam, annoying brainiac that he is, does way better. “A little long too, 21 inches?” He’s at Chal’s shoulder, looking down at the super light bowling ball like the kid is a manifestation of all that is holy in the universe. Considering his parents, they’d kind of expected it to be, but so far, it just looks like a puffy fuschia alien.

“Good eye, Sammy. 21.2! He’s going to keep up the Winchester tradition for height,” Every word that Dad speaks is with nothing but pride. 

“Average is 20 inches,” Sam tells Dean.

“What do you know about baby lengths?” Dean asks Sam, annoyed, at the same time that Chal reminds John that she, too, is tall. 

“Some of us actually read the books that Chal recommended,” sasses Sam.

Dean makes a face at him. “Of course you did, nerd.” Then, to Chal, he asks, “What about, like, feathers? Does he have little wings?”

Someone had put a shower cap on Chal’s messy hair, though bits are poking out from it, and she looks the most matronly he’s ever seen her. She might even pass for Sam’s mom right now, cause she’s got the puffy lower lids and red-streaked eyes thing going on making her look closer to Dad’s age than how she normally appears. So, her smile is a tired one. “No, not at present. I cannot feel his Grace, but we know it’s there from the camp fence and the church.” It hadn’t actually been Chal reacting to the angel repellant, but the baby no one knew about yet in her belly. 

“At present? So, it could happen?” Dean asks. He can’t help investigating the supernatural, even now when he’s supposed to just be focusing on the new addition to the family.

“There were the Nephilim, abominations to the Lord, offspring of angel and humankind. That was long ago, and those angels were intact, not fallen as I am. Thomas is the first baby to be born under these circumstances that I know of.” She frowns. 

Sam pipes up, “We’re hoping he’s not a Nephilim. Apparently God didn’t like them much.” He gives Dean a warning look, apparently, this is a bad subject for the time, a cause for concern for Chal. He can take a hint. 

“But, we aren’t sure if he counts,” says Chal, her gaze naturally turning to the baby with a protective concern. 

“He’ll be safe,” says John adamantly, his hand reaching out to touch the wrappings around the kid. Dean believes it. Thomas has four hunters to look out for him, and even if Sam isn’t packing the psychic punch he used to, Dean knows they’d all fight even God himself to keep this baby from harm.

“Did Dad finish up the nursery?” asks Sam. It feels so good to hear him use that name. Dean doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to hear it without just feeling grateful.

“Yeah, of course Dad finished the nursery,” snarls John with a shake of his head, incredulous that his handyman skills are being called into question. “Also finished up the guest bedroom too, if one of his two idiot older sons wanted to visit once in a while.”

Dean laughs. He’d just been there three weeks earlier, but apparently that’s not enough. Their dad has been going pretty crazy at home, used to traveling the open highway, and of course, freaked about having a newborn again. “It was pretty much done the last time I was there. You know the kid has a diaper genie?”

“Yeah, I bought it for them,” says Sam with a smile.

“Of course you did. And you also bought them flowers,” he says. Dean hadn’t known he was supposed to bring gifts. Now he’ll have to stop by with something extra special the next time he comes through Spring Branch. “Should have known you’d bring something gay like that.”

Sam rolls his eyes, and Dean can nearly hear the chime as the Sam-rolling-his-eyes scoreboard adds one point. “They’re just…” says Sam, looking over at the vase he’d brought in with him. Rather than finishing his sentence, he takes a step towards them and looks intently down. One of his hands reaches behind the vase, pulls up a long fluffy white feather. It’s iridescent and breath-taking. All the humans in the room gawk. Chal smiles, eyes filling with tears. 

Questioningly, Sam looks at her for an explanation.

“It appears that Thomas’s namesake has left a gift.” 

Had the angel been here, invisible, while they’d been talking? It’s unnerving but kind of cool. Dean guesses the winged guy must be pretty flattered that she’d named the kid after him, even if it’s a small token compared to the ballsy act he’d performed of leading Dad and Chal to the Colt. It’s good that not all the other angels were apathetic dickbags.

Sam’s still looking at the feather with awe. “I don’t remember yours,” he says.

“They were beautiful, like Thomas’s,” she says, wistfully. “Thomas the angel’s, that is.”

“Yeah, we get it,” says Dean. 

“It was a sweet gesture,” she says. 

After a few more minutes of conversation about babies and angels, John starts dropping heavy hints that the brothers should leave, let his tired wife have some shut-eye. Dean’s not even sure that she’ll be willing to let the baby go so that she can, but he’s not going to argue with Dad, plus it was starting to feel a little cheesy anyway. They’ll be bringing the baby back home once they get the medical all-clear, and, since they’re both staying at the house, it’s not like they’ll miss anything. 

Outside the hospital, the moment Dean takes the first step through the automatic door, he says, “That is one ugly baby.”

“What? Dean, he’s just been born.”

“Yeah, born ugly.”

Sam looks incredulously at him. “You can’t be this stupid. He just came out. He’s not ugly; he’s just been compact for a while.”

Dean grins. “Don’t try and sugar coat it, Sammy. That kid is gonna grow up to look like something that eats goats under a bridge.” 

They walk in easy steps to the parking garage, Sam in mild offense on their new half-brother’s behalf. He decides to really push the limits, and with a villainous smile, he asks, “Think one of us will end up having sex with that brother, too?”

It takes him a minute to realize that Sam’s fallen out of step, and is, in fact, apoplectic way behind him. Sam’s face is red with embarrassment and anger. Dean points, “Now, I see the resemblance!”

Sam seethes. “That’s too far.”

“Eh,” Dean says. “He’ll grow into the humor. It’s fine.” He unlocks Baby’s door. “You coming?”

Sam isn’t moving, and Dean finally catches up that, yeah, he actually vaulted over Sam’s line. “Too soon?” he asks. He’d been the rejected one. If anyone should be uppity about jokes at their relationship’s expense, it should be him, but Chal had raised Sam to be sensitive, and he didn’t have the thick skin that he might have had if they’d been brought up together. 

“It’s gross, and yeah, too soon.”

Dean flattens his lips. “Yeah, all right, get in the car. I hear ya.” He climbs inside and unlocks the passenger side. Finally, mister prissy pants gets in. Dean smiles at the wary expression on Sam’s face. He’s always loved this part of their dynamic. He almost hopes that Sam never gets used to him, hopes he can rile him at least a little even when they’re both hobbling around with canes. “Stop for food on the way back?”

“Yeah, okay,” says Sam, getting his seatbelt on.

As they drive, Dean decides to go ahead and address the elephant, get it out of the way. “So, you and Max good?” It’s always weird when he brings up his ex-boyfriend’s/brother’s boyfriend. How could it not be? But, if he doesn’t ask, it’ll be rude, and besides, he wants to know. There might be a not insignificant part of him that hopes Sam will say that he kicked Max to the curb, but the bigger part of him wants to check to see that Sam is happy. If he and Max aren’t doing good, he wants to know as both an ex-boyfriend and a brother.

“Yeah,” says Sam, and he gets the impression that he’d been waiting for the question. “He’s volunteering at this center for abused moms and their kids, a place for them to go, you know? Where they won’t be found. He’s got a placement test coming up so that he can enroll next fall. He’s thinking of going into social work.”

Dammit. Sam’s not gonna be kicking Max to the curb anytime soon, not with all that spiffy benevolent shit he has going on. “Wow. That’s good stuff.”

He looks over at Sam, sees the smile he’s trying to repress. Then, Sam addresses the other elephant, the one with better tits. “Made any progress with Willa?”

“I gotta say Sam, you tell a woman that you cheated on her with your little brother, and they always overreact.” Eyeroll scoreboard adds a second point. “Well, we’re talking again, but I think that’s about it for now.”

“So, no big romances on the horizon?” asks Sam. Little shit sounds relieved about it too, if he knows Sam, and he thinks he does.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Sammy.” He looks challengingly over at his first love, the smart ass kid with the big feet who has been the most important thing in his life since he was first born. “You never know what’s gonna happen.” 


End file.
